News

ERZIA Celebrates Contribution to Mission Success

ERZIA congratulates Stefano Vitale, this year’s recipient of the Tycho Brahe Medal. The medal recognizes his leadership of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) Pathfinder mission. The award, bestowed by The European Astronomical Society, acknowledges the mission’s extraordinary success proving the technology required for the gravitational wave observatory planned to be launched in 2034.

Spectrometers employing acousto-optic tunable filters (AOTFs) are rapidly gaining popularity in space, and in particular on interplanetary missions. According to a paper published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, “they allow for reducing volume, mass, and complexity of the instrumentation and are used for analyzing ocean color, greenhouse gases, atmospheres of Mars and Venus, and for lunar mineralogy. The AOTFs are used in point (pencil-beam) spectrometers for selecting echelle diffraction orders, or in hyper-spectral imagers and microscopes.”

Microwave High Power Amplifiers (HPA) are a key component on every RF and microwave system. In this product review we discuss how Wideband High Power Amplifiers (WHPAs) play an important role to boost RF power levels for antennas (or TWTAs) and deliver RF energy.

Designing and building an RF amplifier that can boost a low power generated RF signal required by an AOTF crystal that acts as an optical fiber may appear to be easy for experienced RF designers. However, the special conditions required for space-based scientific instruments make this task an interesting challenge.