Copernicus, the European Union's programme for observing and monitoring the Earth, represents one of the most successful space programmes coordinated and managed by the European Commission in partnership with ESA, the Member States and Agencies. 2020 marked a major step of the Copernicus expansion programme with the selection of six missions to enter into B2CD implementation, namely CHIME, LSTM, CO2M, CRISTAL, ROSE-L, and CIMR. The CHIME mission (Copernicus Hyperspectral Imaging Mission for the Environment) space segment was awarded to an industrial consortium led by Thales Alenia Space (FR), as Mission Prime, and OHB (DE), as Instrument Prime. Within the instrument team, the responsibility of the design and development of the spectrometer system (SPS) have been assigned to AMOS (BE). The SPS is the centrepiece of the CHIME instrument, ensuring the accurate spectral dispersion of the imaged ground swath over wide focal planes. The SPS consists of three identical spectrometer units drawn from the compact de-magnifying freeform Offner optical solution developed at AMOS. Its throughput is guaranteed by a broadband convex diffraction grating, while the image quality and distortion control are enabled using freeform mirrors. This paper describes the mathematical modelling and prototyping activities, including manufacturing and testing of grating samples, carried by AMOS raising the maturity of the CHIME diffraction grating achieving Technology Readiness Level 6 (TRL6).
In this paper, we show how the combined use of low-coherence interferometry, balanced detection, and data processing comparable to that used in Fourier transform spectrometry allows us to characterize with ultimate resolutions (sub-parts per million in level, 0.2 nm in wavelength, and 25 mdeg in angle) the retro-reflection and retro-scattering response of both sides of a 2 mm thick silica wafer.
We present the main improvements to a scatterometer developed at the Fresnel Institute allowing the spatially resolved recording (up to 1 million elementary pixels) of the light transmitted or scattered by a plane sample.
BAMMsat-on-BEXUS is a student-led project in which a CubeSat-compatible payload was designed, manufactured, and flown on the BEXUS30 stratospheric balloon. The prototype payload – BAMMsat (Biology, Astrobiology, Medicine, and Materials Science on satellite) – is a modular CubeSat-compatible miniaturised laboratory termed a bioCubeSat. The core flight objective was to perform technology demonstration of the bioCubeSat technology, demonstrating capability to perform experiments in space, and to understand system performance and identify future requirements. The mission aimed to validate pre-flight, flight, and post-flight operations, with a focus on biological and autonomous operations and the novel payload hardware. C. elegans samples were flown in the payload. The mission was partially successful, as the BAMMsat systems and autonomous software operated successfully despite challenging conditions and a large volume of payload performance data was collected; however there were issues maintaining the viability of the samples during flight and microfluidic system issues that impeded sample containment and imaging operations. Post-flight analysis has been performed, the root causes of the issues identified, and upgraded novel payload hardware is currently being developed and tested.
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