London, Ontario Company Gets Launched Into Space!

Ever wonder what initially happened in the Universe after the Big Bang? The European Space Agency wants to know, and will be launching the Planck satellite in 2008 with scientific equipment supplied by Sciencetech Inc.

Sciencetech Inc. designs and manufactures precision instrumentation for the Spectroscopy market worldwide. Established in 1985, it provides engineering and manufacturing services from its head offices in London, Ontario, Canada.

Sciencetech Inc. President, Mr. Alexander Quaglia, was pleased to announce today the final acceptance and approval of the last phase of a $1.8 million contract with the European Space Agency after 3 years from its initial development. The scientific equipment from Sciencetech Inc. will be used in France by the Institut d’Astrophysique Spaciale for calibration and testing of instrumentation for the Planck satellite. The Herschel Planck mission will analyze, with the highest accuracy ever achieved, the first light that filled the Universe after the Big Bang. This light is called the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.

“The instrumentation that Sciencetech has designed and delivered to the European Space Agency is a small contribution to the enormous challenge of unveiling some of the mysteries of the evolution of matter when governed by these poorly understood forces.

This is a small but significant contribution to science, to our community and to a better future for humanity. On celebrating the Acceptance of this equipment by the European Space Agency, we want to thank all our staff, shareholders, the London Community, and the Canadian social and political climate we work in for allowing us to perform highly technical scientific work at an international level. “

The following is provided in order to put some perspective on its contribution to space development.

Importance of the Project:

The 2006 Nobel Prize for physics has been awarded to Americans John C. Mather and George F. Smoot for their work on NASA’s 1989 Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite.

In 2008, ESA’s Planck satellite will be launched and will build on award-winning legacy by showing cosmologists new details of the Universe’s origin.

COBE cemented the Big Bang theory of the Universe’s origins but it could not answer every question. In some way it raised more that it answered, leaving cosmologists hungry to explore the details of how the Universe began. ESA’s Planck satellite will address these questions.

As COBE did, Planck will look back to the dawn of time and observe the most ancient radiation in the Universe: the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Planck will do so with the most sensitive instruments ever brought to bear on this ancient radiation from space, the best place to make such observations.

The Nobel committee’s recognition of Mather and Smoot reinforces the fundamental importance of research into the microwave background radiation. With Planck, ESA looks forward to taking this research to a new level of detail, says Jan Tauber, Planck Project Scientist.

Whereas COBE convincingly confirmed that the Universe was born out of superheated primordial gas, Planck will look to understand the fundamental structure and components of the infant Universe, and for the details of how giant clusters of galaxies and even individual galaxies formed out of the initial fireball.

Planck will also investigate whether the Universe suffered a period of sudden exponential expansion, termed inflation, shortly after the Big Bang. It will do this by surveying the whole sky, looking for subtle temperature variations in the CMB from place to place. The temperature variations betray regions of different density in the early Universe. High-density regions eventually became the galaxies and clusters of galaxies we see in the Universe today.

The Cosmic Microwave Background comes from everywhere with (almost) the same level and it was confirmed by the COBE satellite which measured (almost) the same temperature in degree Kelvin everywhere on the sky.

However, the very existence of other galaxies points to the fact that there should be changes in the measured temperature of the CMB. These changes, or fluctuations, provided the seeds for the formation of the galaxies that we see today.

Planck will be able to measure these tiny fluctuations. Indeed it will be able to detect temperature differences of 5 millionths of a degree!

To achieve its goals, Planck has been designed to have ten times better instantaneous and more than fifty time the angular resolution of COBE; these quantities taken to Planck about one thousand times more powerful than COBE.

The Satellite size is 3.8 m high and 4.5 m wide the telescope is 1.5 m diameter. One of the sectors of the instrument must be kept as close as possible at –273 C while the other segment several hundreds of degrees hotter. It is operating from the “Lagrange Point” that is 1.5 Million kilometres away from Earth.

Instrumentation:

The instrumentation developed by Sciencetech in London will allow the calibration of the detection system used by the High Frequency Instrument and allow this better mapping of the background light reaching us from space.

Why is the “first light” of the Universe detected today as Microwaves? When the first light CMB was released, the Universe was much smaller than it is now. As a consequence, the waves of that primeval light were much more compressed, that is, their frequency was very high. The Universe has expanded since then, so the waves of that light have stretched, or the frequency of the CMB waves now is much lower than it used to be. They are classified in the Microwave range.

Planck is designed to see the microwaves and in practice it will detect them by measuring temperature. That temperature is already known to be about 2.7K. It was measured to be 2.726 K all over the sky to three decimal figures. This degree of accuracy in the measurement may seem good enough but much more precise measurements are needed. Scientists know, from previous observations, that slilghtly hotter or colder “patches” appear in the sky (different by one part in 100,000). Again, this may seem like a small difference but these differences in temperature are nothing less than the imprints left in the MB by the primeval “seeds” of today’s huge concentration of matter – the galaxies and galaxy clusters for example.

These variations called anisotropies will be sensed by the Planck’s detectors. Plank will have two highly sensitive detectors called the low frequency instrument and the high frequency instrument.

The Low Frequency Instrument (or LFI) is an array of 22 tuned radio receivers that will be operated at –253 C. These receivers will work grouped in four frequency channels, centred between 30 and 100 GHz. They are based on devices called “HEMTs” (High Electro Mobility Transistors) and work just like transistor radios. The transistors amplify the signals collected by the antenna (the telescope) and the amplified signal is then converted to a voltage. In a normal radio the detected signal would then be passed on to a speaker, but in Planck it will instead be stored in a computer for later analysis.

The High Frequency Instrument (or HFI) is an array of 52 bolometric detectors, which work by converting radiation to heat. The amount of heat is then measured by a tiny electrical thermometer, the signal from which is converted to a temperature by a computer. The HFI detectors will work in six frequency channels centred between 100 and 857 GHz. They are operated at –272.9C (only one tenth of a one degree above absolute zero). To achieve that temperature a complex system of on-board refrigerators is used each of which uses a different technology to provide a successively colder temperature.

Journey:

The launcher will inject Planck into a transfer trajectory and, after about four months, the satellite will reach its final orbit 1.5 million kilometres away from the Earth at a point called “L2”. This is far enough away to avoid the undesirable emission of heat from the Earth, the Moon and the sun which would cause too much interference in the measurements.

Planck will be launched with the Herschel satellite. After launch, Planck and Herschell will separate.

Partnerships:

More than 40 European and some US scientific institutes will participate in the construction of the instruments.

The LFI will be designed and built by a consortium of more than 22 scientific institutes led by the Instituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica (CNR) in Bologna Italy.

The HFI will be designed and built by a consortium of more than 20 scientific Institutes led by the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (CNRS) in Orsay, France

Knowing our Universe and the laws that have created and are ruling its evolution are very important. It is not only a curiosity. Since the knowledge of the Molecular physics and chemistry, we have created a new era by entering into the secrets of the Atomic structure. With the research on the Big Bang, we are trying to better understand the Nuclear and “close range” forces laws. They are practically unknown now. It is clear to all of us is that new frontier may answer many questions about our present limited knowledge of space and time and the law of nature that govern all of us.

For more details please refer to :

Sciencetech web site: www.sciencetech-inc.com

European Space Agency web site: http://www.esa.int/esaCP/index.html

Contact: Michelle Lazure 519 668-0131 ext. 105
michelle@sciencetech-inc.com