From today (August 11th) up until Friday the yearly Perseids meteor shower will have its peak. This phenomenon is not only interesting for amateur astronomers, professional astronomers will be observing them as well.
STORIES
In Humans of ASTRON we share stories about the people at ASTRON. Who are the people behind the discoveries and innovations and also, who are the people that make sure that everything runs smoothly? In this second part of the series, we’ll be sharing the story of Jorrit Siebenga, who joined ASTRON in 2017 as research instrument maker.
Throughout the history of astronomy, women have played essential roles towards astronomical breakthroughs. In this article we highlight but a few of these women identified in history from 1600 to the modern era.
In Humans of ASTRON we share stories about the people at ASTRON. Who are the people behind the discoveries and innovations and also, who are the people that make sure that everything runs smoothly? In this second part of the series, we’ll be sharing the story of Emanuela Orrù, support scientist at ASTRON since 2012.
DAILY IMAGE
Spotcooling for Low Noise Amplifiers
© ASTRON®
Miniature thermo-electric peltier modules, that are used to stabilize the temperature of high performance lasers for optical links, have a large ΔT and can be used to cool the chip directly when integrated in the LNA design.
This cooling implementation is more energy and cost efficient than cryogenic setups and can lower the noise contribution of the LNA to the receiver noise, increasing sensitivity of our radio telescopes with negligible power draw.
The image shows the latest prototype of an LNA, that uses the same indium phosphide transistors (pHEMTS) as the ALF project, with 'spot cooling' using a cooler of 1.5 x 1.8 mm.
It achieved an improvement in the minimum achieved noise temperature of 15% w.r.t. room temperature using only 1 Watt of cooling power, which is more than 200x as efficient per Kelvin as the MFFE cryostat.
We are investigating the possibilities to improve the heatsink for the thermo-electric cooler using microfluidics and Advanced Additive Manufacturing technology aiming at full integration with the horn antenna in an active OMT to bring down the noise below what is possible at room temperature.
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