By SIMON COLLINS
Some of the world's biggest telescopes will soon be using New Zealand-made lenses.
KiwiStar Optics, a business unit of state-owned Industrial Research (IRL), has booked orders worth $500,000 for big specialist lenses since Christmas.
It is building components for two of the world's biggest telescopes, both in Hawaii -
Japan's Subaru telescope, and the Gemini Observatory, which is run by eight countries, including Australia.
It expects to help build components for a South African telescope in which Canterbury University is a shareholder, and is making a lens for a new $7 million telescope being built in Japan for Canterbury's Mt John Observatory at Lake Tekapo.
"We are in a big upswing," said lens designer Andrew Rakich.
IRL and its predecessor, the former Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), have designed lenses for local telescopes for years, but it has only just started marketing internationally. Mr Rakich said "the real drive" started when a former Unilever executive, Nigel Kirkpatrick, took over as IRL boss last July.
"There is a ready market for these skills and they are in much demand," Mr Rakich said.
"We see this as potentially a multimillion-dollar export industry."
The unit is part of an "optics cluster" that earned $13 million from exports last year based on skills honed at local universities and the DSIR.
Porirua company Vega Industries was set up in 1972 to commercialise a harbour light designed by the DSIR head of optics, Norm Rumsey. It now makes a variety of lights and beacons.
Another company, Beaglehole Instruments, was started in 1991 by Victoria University Professor David Beaglehole and has become a world leader in instruments to measure layers of molecules down to smaller than a billionth of a metre thick.
Mr Rakich said Mr Rumsey, now 81, was still publishing optics papers in international journals.
"He's like my mentor," he said. "Optics is what I have been studying in New Zealand for 12 years but there are not any places teaching it. I've had to be quite creative, getting supervision from overseas."
He said designing lenses was "as much an art as a science", and Mr Rumsey gave IRL the advantage of "deep theoretical understanding".
New Zealanders could also work more cheaply than the Americans or Europeans, and had the advantage of speaking the same language as the biggest customers, English.
The unit is still small at five staff, up two in the past year. But it plans to take on more workers as it expands into new markets.
www.kiwistaroptics.com
By SIMON COLLINS
Some of the world's biggest telescopes will soon be using New Zealand-made lenses.
KiwiStar Optics, a business unit of state-owned Industrial Research (IRL), has booked orders worth $500,000 for big specialist lenses since Christmas.
It is building components for two of the world's biggest telescopes, both in Hawaii -
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