Working for Elena Saenz of ESA's technical staff, Roger Appleby and Richard Wylde have installed a mm-wave Scatterometer in clean-room facilities in ESTEC in Holland. Designed to measure scattering from both metalic and dielectric materials down to very low levels, the instrument will cover frequencies from W-band to 750 GHz.   An Agilent VNA and VDI heads are used to measuring scattered power, with both the incidence and reflected angles determed by precision optics driven by stepping motors.  The suble nature of the 125mm split-cube optics was enhanced by calculations performed by Cecilia Cappellin of TICRA, and the software control sysyem developed by Phil Atkin of Pixel An...

The TK designed and built EUMETSAT / ESA / AIRBUS MetOP-SG MWS Quasi-Optics Network  Engineering Qualification Model has been completed and will shortly start its electromagnetic testing in specially built facilities in the Physics Department of Cardiff University:     The red parts are supporting components... and (when use in a flight model) not destined for Space.... you have to remember toremove them.  

TK is proud to have supplied a polarizing grid and an ultragaussian corrugated feed horn for an experimental 425 GHz radiometer now operating in geostationary orbit some 35,786 Km above Indonesia. The radiometer was designed and built by the Shanghai Spaceflight Institute of TT&C and Telecommunication in Shanghai and launched in December 2016 as part of FY4A, a Chinese optical metrological satellite The advanced ultragaussian horn provided very low sidelobe feed to the scanning optics: The designed antenna pattern can be seen below  Snippets of the mechanical designs can be seen below    

The combined VDI/TK team.... Tom Crowe, Jeffrey Hesler and his sister Tracy Lind plus the TK contingent of Lucy and Richard Wylde, and Lucy's brother William Wilcock travelled up to the Washington State's northern Cascades to climb, Mt. Baker, a still active stratovolcano that lies close to the Canadian border. There's a British connection here as Mt. Baker is named after third lieutenant Joseph Baker of the Royal Navy's 1791-1795 Vancouver expedition, which explored the American North West. After collecting our excellent guides Kevin and Karl from the American Alpine Institute in Bellingham we ventured inland to the trailhead at 3700 ft (1100 M). The trek in along the Heliotrope Ridge invol...

QMC Instruments Ltd. has offered cryogen-free THz detector systems since the autumn of 2012. This landmark is proving invaluable to those who do not have easy access to liquid cryogens. 24/7 operation is also a boon to many research groups with a heavy workload. In April 2017 our Sales Director Ken Wood was in the US to commission two such systems. Here is Professor Mona Jarrahi at UCLA with her system set up on her optical bench. Just a few days later Ken was further east with another very similar system. Here is Professor Susanna Widicus Weaver and members of her group at Emory University in Atlanta alongside their new detector. Note the size of the compressor (grey object lower left of im...

Our colleague Roland Albers.... currently buried in TK's MetOP-SG and ATMS programmes .... was the well deserved winner with his team members from Cranfield at UKSPACE 2017's Sir Authur C Clarke Centenary Awards in the Student category for winning the Mars society's international group design competition for a manned Mars flyby ..... Lot of details here      Roland in the middle here with Tim Peake and members of his student team (Will Blackler, Tiago Matos and Rob Sandford).   and a better image of Roland with his colleagues is here