But, on the other hand, the Hughes subcontract is a very lucrative program for the company and provides a firm foundation. The other area that I like to point out, as well, is that we are building a deformable mirror for a medical imaging application for the University of Rochester Eye Institute. I believe adaptive optics and deformable mirrors, at the right price, could really penetrate the medical imaging area. Like a conventional AO system, you have to have some sort of light feedback signal and measurement. A conventional Hartmann wavefront sensor provides the correction required and the deformable mirror is used to compensate the phase.
Scale is the important issue.
You're imaging through a turbid medium such as blood. Then there's also vibration. If you can make an adaptive optics system with a deformable mirror with smaller actuator spacing, you can conceivably do better imaging. That's basically what we're doing. One of the products we're developing involves reducing the actuator spacing from the normal 7 mm that was used for astronomy to something much less than one millimeter.