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Optical systems with long production life cycles can encounter cost saving vendor and/or technology changes that may be difficult to incorporate into the system without total system redesign. Many times, these developments could result in significant cost savings of the hardware, but the level of up front investment in system redesign and qualification tends to nullify the hardware production cost advantage. The subject of this paper, is a cost reduction effort to redesign, and replace a high cost metallic primary mirror. The use of less costly materials is the major cost saver, but this can lead to poor athermal system performance without other system changes. The technique used in this application is tuning an optical replication process to athermalize the new mirror into the existing optical train.
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