Laboratory development device to help Earth avoid asteroids

In a corner of the Riga Technical University campus, a team of scientists are working on technology that could one day prevent asteroids from crashing into Earth.

High-precision hand-built timers in the laboratory of Latvian start-up Eventech are currently used to track satellites.

This year, the company won a contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop timers that will study the possibility of redirecting an asteroid before it gets too close to our planet for added convenience.

NASA plans to launch part one of the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission – known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – on July 22, 2021 on a Falcon 9 rocket owned by tech mogul Elon Musk’s. Space X.

The probe equipped with a 500 kilograms (1,100 pound) camera will fly towards an asteroid named Didymos and crash into it, trying to blow it up from its current course which will see it pass close to Earth in 2123.

Eventech’s deep space event timers are under development for the HERA follow-up mission, which is expected to launch five years later, to determine if the first mission was successful.

‘To go boldly’

“Our new technology that will follow on ESA’s second spacecraft named HERA will measure whether the first impact took the Didymos away from its previous course, avoiding harm to humanity,” Engineer Imants Pulkstenis told AFP. of Eventech, in the laboratory.

“It is much more interesting to boldly go where no man has gone before than to make mundane consumer electronics for huge profits,” he added, borrowing the famous slogan from Star Trek, the series cult science fiction television from the 1960s.

Eventech’s timers are part of a tradition of space technology in the Baltic state that dates back to Soviet times when Sputnik – the first man-made satellite to orbit the Earth – was launched in 1957.

They measure the time it takes for a pulse of light to travel to an object in orbit and back.

Eventech devices can record the measurement at either a picosecond or a trillion second, allowing astronomers to convert a time measurement to a distance measurement with up to two millimeters of precision.

Sending timers to deep space

About ten timers are produced each year and are used in observatories around the world.

They track Earth’s increasingly crowded atmosphere, filled with a new crop of private satellites alongside traditional science and military satellites.

“Tracking them all requires tools,” said Pavels Razmajevs, COO of Eventech.

Although Latvia did not become a full member of ESA until 2016, its engineers have been tracking satellites since the Soviet era.

The University of Latvia even has its own satellite laser telemetry station in a forest south of Riga.

Eventech engineers said they use analog parts as much as possible, mainly because the microchips take nanoseconds to calculate the signal, which is too long for incoming picosecond measurements.

Even the physical length of the motherboard can affect the speed at which the signal travels from one circuit to another.

While these timers are used for calculations on Earth, a different device for deep space missions is being developed in another corner of the same lab to track planetary objects from a moving space probe.

“There is no GPS data coverage available on the other planets, so you have to take your own telemetry precision with you,” Pulkstenis said.

Developing devices for deep space will be a complex task, but the engineers at Eventech are thrilled.

“Our updated technology must withstand extreme space temperatures and extreme cosmic radiation,” Pulkstenis said. “It’s a fun challenge”.

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© 2020 AFP