Together, NASA, NanoLab and Ball will push this material through a series of qualification tests so it can be used as an aerospace optical coating. Apart from optical coatings, the aligned arrays have also been demonstrated in the laboratory as: Dry adhesives (gecko-foot),Electrodes (ultracapacitors, batteries, fuel cells),Thermal interface materials, Field emitters (cathodes, electric propulsion, x-ray sources),Optical antennas, &Chemical-biological sensors We expect that an aligned array manufacturing system, once implemented would be able to serve this number of additional markets, which we will explore. Terrestrial, non-space qualified applications will likely be commercialized first. The first product we anticipate is a reference optical black, for calibration of spectrometers, pryometers and the like. Other optically black devices include laser beam dumps, black body emitters, etc.
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