Aerospace & Defence

  Optical Surfaces has announced that it has received an order from the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) for twelve ultra-fast focusing 370mm diameter aspheric lenses for its Orion petawatt laser research facility.

UK industry will benefit from a £92m injection to design a national alternative to the EU’s Galileo satellite system, ensuring UK security post Brexit. The money has been allocated from the £3bn Brexit readiness fund announced at last year’s Budget and will be rolled out over the coming months. Satellite navigation systems like GPS are increasingly important for commercial, military and other critical application...

NASA has launched a bold mission to fly directly into the sun’s atmosphere, with a spacecraft named the Parker Solar Probe, after solar astrophysicist Eugene Parker. The incredibly resilient vessel, vaguely shaped like a lightbulb the size of a small car, was launched early in yesterday morning from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Its trajectory will aim straight for the sun, where the probe will come closer to the solar surfac...

Programmable power products provider, Magna-Power Electronics, has announced the delivery of a 1MW water cooled DC electronic load to the US Navy, which will be used to research, develop, test, and evaluate the operation of Energy Storage Modules (ESMs) in a shipboard environment. 

The Memory Division of Kaman Precision Products, designer and manufacturer of digital storage systems and media for military and aerospace applications, has announced the Kaman SATA Card, a rugged hermetically sealed card featuring a conveniently small form factor and high memory density. 

Fibre Patch Placement (FPP) has become the preferred technology for the automated production of complex fibre composite components. The additive manufacturing of components with suitably sized patches is used especially in the aerospace and automotive industries, for medical devices and sports equipment. 

Earthbound detectives rely on fingerprints to solve their cases; now astronomers can do the same, using 'light-fingerprints' to uncover the mysteries of exoplanets. Cornell researchers have created a reference catalogue using calibrated spectra and geometric albedos of 19 of the most diverse bodies in our solar system: all eight planets, from rocky to gaseous; nine moons, from frozen to lava spewing; and two dwarf planets, one in the asteroi...

The CF/CFS Series Dielectric Ceramic Pulse Chips Capacitors with a Printed Resistor option from Exxelia Temex are available at distributor New Yorker Electronics. Designed for Military/Defense, these capacitors are ideal for charge/discharge applications and AC filtering for high power RF.

The microwave engineering company, Flann Microwave, is supplying vital components to the US space agency NASA for a major spaceflight mission making the first-ever global survey of Earth's surface water.

A research team led by astronomers at the University of Warwick had to wait over 100 days for the sight of the first of confirmed neutron star merger to re-emerge from behind the glare of the sun. They were rewarded with the first confirmed visual sighting of a jet of material that was still streaming out from merged star exactly 110 days after that initial cataclysmic merger event was first observed. Their observations confirm a key predict...