Abstract
A high precision measurement system of the distance between the moon and earth is under development by the National astronomical observatory of Japan, in which the round-trip time of laser from the earth to the moon is measured to calculate the distance. In the system, a new lunar laser reflector (LLR) placed on the moon is necessary to measure the round-trip time, but has not yet been realized. In this study, we proposed a new polishing method using a plate spring suitable for polishing the LLR to realize it. To evaluate our proposed method, we polished single crystal Si wafers as workpieces, and examined surface roughness and machined shapes of the polished areas. As a result, surface roughness after the polishing was better than that before polishing. This proves that our proposed method using the plate spring enables the smoothing of surfaces. However, the machined areas were not shaped to flat, but to be curved. The reason for this is possibly due to the non-uniformity of the polishing load. Thus, the flatness of the machined areas should be improved in future study.
