Aerospace & Defence

Very recently on the 5th May, NASA’s Mars Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission  was launched using a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V 401 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a 300-million-mile trip to Mars to study for the first time what lies deep beneath the surface of the Red Planet. Guest blog written by Chip Downing.

TE Connectivity (TE) is pleased to announce the release of its new CII FC-335 series relay. Designed to manage harsh inductive, motor and lamp loads, this high-performance relay offers a rugged means of power switching in a range of aerospace, defence and marine applications. TE’s new relays are built to handle higher capacity loads than most comparable mid-range relays on the market, offering a 35A/28VDC resistive load rating.

Researchers playing with a cloud of ultracold atoms uncovered behaviour that bears a striking resemblance to the universe in microcosm. Their work, which forges new connections between atomic physics and the sudden expansion of the early universe, will be published in Physical Review X and highlighted by Physics. "From the atomic physics perspective, the experiment is beautifully described by existing theory," says Stephen Eck...

TT Electronics has announced the introduction of its New Space Electronics range. Higher volume satellite constellations in low Earth orbit are driving a requirement for increasingly cost effective components. The company's New Space Electronics offers a solution that delivers reduced screening but is fully traceable, with proven space grade heritage.

There are potentially thousands of planets that lie just outside our solar system — galactic neighbours that could be rocky worlds or more tenuous collections of gas and dust. Where are these closest exoplanets located? And which of them might we be able to probe for clues to their composition and even habitability? The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will be the first to seek out these nearby worlds.

  Internationally downward pressure on defence budgets has meant that the majority of military equipment contractors are looking for ways to provide fit for purpose products at competitive prices.  

Harmonic Drive UK will be exhibiting its range of high precision gears at this year’s Farnborough International Airshow. The company will be on Stand 4026 in Hall 4 from 16th to 22nd July to advise aerospace manufacturers on the best gearing system for their product. More than 40 years ago, the first Harmonic Drive gears were sent into space during the Apollo 15 mission.

As part of an effort to identify distant planets hospitable to life, NASA has established a crowdsourcing project in which volunteers search telescopic images for evidence of debris disks around stars, which are good indicators of exoplanets. Using the results of that project, researchers at MIT have now trained a machine-learning system to search for debris disks itself.

Microsemi has announced its radiation-tolerant AAHS298B eight-channel source driver for space applications, which has been successfully qualified and certified by the US Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) as Qualified Manufacturers List (QML) Class V and Q, with four Standard Microcircuits Drawings (SMDs) listed, is now in production. 

On the 11th of November, 2014, a global network of telescopes picked up signals from 300 million light years away that were created by a tidal disruption flare — an explosion of electromagnetic energy that occurs when a black hole rips apart a passing star. Since this discovery, astronomers have trained other telescopes on this very rare event to learn more about how black holes devour matter and regulate the growth of galaxies.