Aerospace & Defence

Pressure and humidity measuring devices are being delivered by Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), based on Vaisala's technology to NASA's Mars 2020 Rover. The pressure measurement devices were finalised earlier this year and now also the humidity measuring instruments are completed and ready for the final testing. 

It has been announced by Mentor, a Siemens business, that Leonardo has accelerated its field programmable gate array (FPGA) design cycle, using advanced verification techniques made possible with the Questa verification solution. Mentor’s Questa provides a comprehensive verification solution for integrated circuit (IC) design and verification.

Connectivity and sensor provider, TE Connectivity, has worked with Airbus to develop a highly customised set of labels for identifying wing components. Airbus wanted to take a visual and intuitive approach to identification labelling of complex subsystems and assemblies in aircraft wings to help its technicians to position identification labels quickly and accurately.

The US Army's initiatives for dismounted soldier systems are using real time digital communication technologies to network ground soldiers to a wealth of battlefield and data from smart devices to provide vital situational awareness.

The TT9 SMT series is a new DC – 20GHz wideband surface-mount fixed attenuator Series from Smiths Interconnect optimised to provide performance and power to applications in the defence market. Utilising more than 40 years of experience in refining attenuation solutions for defence, the TT9 offers a power handling capability of 500W while maintaining excellent impedance matching in an SMT package.

TE Connectivity is presenting its PVF self-laminating labels for aerospace and defence. The PVF labels can be used in a wide variety of applications where there is exposure to extreme temperatures. They operate between -40°C and 107°C, which makes them suitable for identification of wire and cable in environments where temperatures fluctuate widely such as during flights.

Designer and manufacturer of flexible shafts and related assemblies, S.S. White Technologies, highlights bespoke flexible shaft solutions for aerospace applications. Flexible shafts transmit rotary motion much like a solid shaft, but can be routed over, under and around obstacles where a solid shaft cannot be used. 

  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...