An optical bench that holds path length and boresight through orbital thermal cycling, with CTE tuned near-zero at your instrument's operating point.
An instrument's pointing and focus are set by the distance between optical elements, and that distance is a property of the bench. A micron of net expansion across a 300 mm bench walks the boresight by an amount the attitude system cannot recover, because the error sits inside the instrument rather than in the pointing. In orbit the platform cycles through eclipse and sunlight roughly every 90 minutes, so the error is not a one-time offset but a periodic drift that has to be characterized or removed. Heritage ultra-low-expansion blanks put their zero-crossing where the material was designed, not where the instrument runs, leaving a residual slope across the operating point. Machined to shape on a 12-18 month lead time, that residual is fixed before the optical design is frozen.
Strocera sets the zero-crossing at your instrument's actual operating temperature, supplied as a ready-to-fire powder blend characterised over 100 to 800 °C. You specify the thermal point and the alignment budget in microns; the formulation is adjusted so net path length change stays inside it through the orbital cycle. Dilatometry documents the expansion curve you design against, so the stability claim is traceable through mission assurance rather than asserted from a datasheet. Forming your own geometry removes the finished-blank queue, which means the bench can be iterated after the optical design changes instead of before.
Full Adaptive Glass-Ceramic specCTE tuning validated by dilatometry; per-instrument zero-point set to customer thermal data.
Smallsat optomechanical engineers holding boresight and focus inside a stated alignment budget through orbital thermal cycling.
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Tell us the operating conditions. We'll formulate Adaptive Glass-Ceramic to your application, and ship a ready-to-fire powder blend, not a 12-18 month blank.
