SRON’s aerosol instrument SPEX airborne is spreading its wings again. In early October it will start a series of measurement flights across Europe onboard a Falcon-20 research aircraft. SPEX airborne will measure aerosols in the atmosphere—tiny dust particles that can disrupt measurements of the greenhouse gas CO2. In time, SPEX is intended to go into space as part of the European SCARBO mission.
Month: September 2020
SRON detector array demonstrates novel microwave readout
Over the years, SRON has developed increasingly sensitive Transition Edge Sensors (TES) for space missions such as SPICA and Athena. One of those TES detector arrays, developed as backup X-ray microcalorimeters for Athena, has now played a vital role to demonstrate a new readout technology developed at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan. This technology is called low-noise microwave SQUIDs multiplexed readout. The research results are published in Applied Physics Letters.
Two new arrays complete detector for GUSTO mission
GUSTO is a balloon telescope that will simultaneously map three types of material in the gas and dust between stars. SRON and TU Delft develop all three detector arrays for this NASA mission. The final two flight arrays have now passed their pre-shipment review and are shipped to the University of Arizona for integration into the balloon observatory. Together with the earlier shipped array for 4.7 terahertz, the 1.4 and 1.9 terahertz arrays complete GUSTO’s flight detector.
