• Korean Journal of Optics and Photonics
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.331-337
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• 2013

A large optical surface is fabricated by grinding, polishing and figuring. The grinding process is the most rapid and has the largest amount of fabrication of all processes. If we measure the surface precisely and rapidly in the grinding process, it is possible to improve the efficiency of the fabrication process. Since the surface of grinding process is rough and not shiny, it is not easy to measure the surface using light so that we cannot use an interferometer. Therefore, we have to measure the surface using a mechanical method. We can measure the surface under the grinding process by using a laser tracker which is a portable 3-dimensional coordinate measuring machine. In this paper, we used the laser tracker to measure the surface error of 1 m diameter spherical mirror. This measurement result was compared to that of an interferometer. As a result, surface measurement error was found to be $0.2{\mu}m$ rms (root mean square) and $2.7{\mu}m$ PV (Peak to Valley), which is accurate enough to apply to the rough surface under the grinding stage.