Military/Aerospace Electronics

Atmel has moved its mixed-signal Asics for radiation-hardened (rad-hard) applications to a 150nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process. The ATMX150RHA Asic platform delivers up to 22 million routable gates, includes non-volatile memory blocks, flexible form factor with compiled SRAM and DPRAM blocks, and supports 2.5/3.3/5V and high-voltage (25-45-65V) I/Os with pre-qualified analogue intellectual property. Third-party design support includes Synopsys, Mentor and Cadence. ...

A two-way power divider that is designed for use in military mobile jamming systems to counter the threat of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) is available from Link Microtek.  Manufactured by Narda Microwave, the Model 2382-2 power divider operates over microwave frequencies from 500MHz to 6GHz and can handle an input power of up to 250W CW or 2kW peak. As well as ...

MACOM has a high power pulsed amplifier designed for Civil Air Traffic Control and Weather Radar. The device can be used individually, or in a complete MACOM chipset solution.

In July this year , if all goes well, we will see close-up photos of Pluto for the first time courtesy of NASA and its New Horizons mission. Launched in 2006, New Horizons woke briefly in 2007 to take a look at Jupiter and make use of its gravity, and has been sleeping ever since. One year to Jupiter, then ...

It’s time for Martian rovers to put the pedal to the metal. A system that lets rovers handle more of their own navigation could spell more speed for interplanetary explorers. It’s badly needed: the Curiosity rover, our best on the Red Planet, only covers about 200 metres per day. That’s because when a rover encounters an obstacle it can’t negotiate ...

For the first time, a spacecraft is orbiting a comet, and soon its lander will be sitting on this dusty remnant of the early solar system. The pictures of 4km wide 67p/Churyumov-Gerasimenko are amazing. And every single one has been taken through sensors made by Essex firm E2V – the go-to space imager place for the European Space Agency, NASA, ...

Alongside NASA’s Cygnus cargo pod, dozens of CubeSats were destroyed in the Antares rocket launch failure. Among them were 26 Dove earth-observation CubeSats from Planet Labs, known as Flock-1d “Space is hard and our hearts go out to our fellow space innovators on that launch,” said the firm. “Our approach to mitigate risks is to deploy our fleets of satellites ...

China is planning to launch an uncrewed spacecraft on a quick jaunt around the moon, in a test of technology designed to return rocks from the lunar surface to Earth. The Chang’e 5-T1 mission is set to blast off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan, China, on 23 October. It will fly around the back of the moon ...

When the Rosetta spacecraft sends its lander to the surface of a comet on 12 November, the lander will follow pre-arranged orders from Earth to touch down safely and send data home for analysis. But future spacecraft may be able to do it all on their own. Kiri Wagstaff and her colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have developed software ...

Tiny, cheap CubeSats are becoming an increasing danger in space. The mini-satellites could cause catastrophic collisions with larger craft, threatening to produce orbiting blizzards of space debris like those in the movie Gravity. CubeSats measure just 10 centimetres on a side and weigh a maximum of 1.3 kilograms. The satellites can easily launch on multiple types of rockets or from the International ...