Product category:
Form/co-ordinate, optical and vision instrumentation
News Release from: Precision-Optical Engineering
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial
Team on 03 May 2005
Lenses survive space duties
The success of the Cassini-Huygens mission to explore Saturn, its rings and moons has been due in no small part to the extraordinary performance and reliability of the scientific instruments onboard.
The spectacular success of the Cassini-Huygens mission to explore Saturn, its rings and its moons has been due in no small part to the extraordinary performance and reliability of the 12 scientific instruments carried onboard Precision-Optical Engineering (P-OE) is delighted to have supplied a selection of diamond machined germanium lenses for the spacecraft's composite infra-red spectrometer (CIRS)
This article was originally published on Engineeringtalk on 12 Jul 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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The CIRS is used to measure infra-red emissions from atmospheres, rings and surface in the huge Saturn system to determine their composition, temperatures and thermal properties.
The instrument has already delivered outstanding results, including the most detailed temperature measurements to date of Saturn's rings and, most recently, how daytime temperatures at low latitudes on the dark material on Saturn's moon Iapetus vary with time of day, from about 130K at noon to about 70K at sunset.
The CIRS consists of two combined interferometers operating in the far-infra-red (10-600cm-1) and the mid-infra-red (600-1400cm-1).
The two interferometers share a common telescope and scanner.
A germanium lens is used on the mid-infra-red interferometer to focus the interferometer output onto the instrument's focal planes.
A series of lenses were diamond machined by P-OE in order to allow the best optical match to be obtained for the instrument.
The lenses were manufactured in 1994, in readiness for the spacecraft launch in 1997.
P-OE's diamond machined optics had been used previously in space onboard the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite.
The mission continues for another three years and the CIRS still has an exhaustive programme of data collection, including more than 40 additional fly-bys of Titan.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a co-operative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, DC.
The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL.
The composite infra-red spectrometer team is based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight centre, Greenbelt, Maryland.
The lenses supplied by POE were part of a subsystem contributed by Oxford University and funded by the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council.
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