Future UV/Optical telescopes will require increasingly large apertures to answer the questions raised by HST, JWST, Planck and Hershel, and to complement the = 30-m ground-based telescopes that will be coming on line in the next decade. Apertures in space in a 10m-class scale will be needed to serve this goal. For diffraction limited performance, technologies are therefore required that provide a high degree of thermal and dynamic stability, and wave front sensing and control.
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