

Deformable Liquid Mirrors - helwr
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25342/

======
iamwil
You should be able to use the liquid mirror in space though, since they won't
dump out of the container. Perhaps you'd introduce other problems then, and
the corrective advantages of having these mirrors on the ground to look
through atmospheric effects is lost.

~~~
shalmanese
You don't have gravity in orbit so there's nothing to hold the mirror down.

~~~
David
The article talks about using a ferromagnetic liquid and magnetic fields to
make adjustments to the surface of the mirror, so a magnetic liquid mirror is
possible.

Use the magnetic field to keep the mirror on the desired surface. No
atmosphere in space, so there's no other use/necessity for the technology,
right? And we already have proof of concept: "Today, Brousseau and buddies
reveal a next generation liquid mirror that gets around these problems. The
proof-of-principle mirror is just 5 cm across but sits atop a honeycomb of 91
actuators that can deform the liquid. […] And they've overcome the the non-
linear control problems by superimposing a strong uniform magnetic field on
top of the field created by the actuators. This has the effect of linearising
the response of the liquid."

