ESA Looks… And Finds Galileo Avionica

Galileo Avionica has recently been awarded three important contracts by the European Space Agency (ESA) for the creation of special coatings with very high performance levels to be applied on components to be installed onboard optical systems in upcoming ESA missions. The company’s Vacuum Technologies center at Carsoli carries on Research and Development activity as well as specialized production in optical coatings. The optical coatings realized at the Carsoli center are manufactured in a vacuum using different technologies. They are applied on optics such as lenses, windows, and mirrors to maximize their optical properties in the UV-NIR range.





The first contract already been successfully completed. The contract included the manufacturing of a demonstrator (BreadBoard) of the TIRD (Thermal Infrared Rejection Device), essentially composed by an optical filter (multilayer coating) deposited on a circular window of 100 mm in diameter, fixed on an aluminum mounting structure to allow positioning on the spacecraft to protect one or more optical systems of the Mercury Planetary Orbiter payload, one of the two shuttles that are part of the Bepi Colombo. Considering the proximity of the spacecraft to the Sun during the entire mission life (part orbiting over Mercury), some of the instruments are required to reject light radiations in the infrared spectrum from 2 to 20 microns. The Galileo Avionica filter met all the requirements.




The second contract has just successfully passed the qualification phase of the optical coatings, a most critical step. The ESA has accepted the technical solutions proposed by Galileo Avionica and the experiment’s results and has given its authorization to the completion of the demonstrator. Galileo Avionica will create an extremely sophisticated filter to protect the Visible Imager and Magnetograph (VIM), an instrument that is part of the payload of the Solar Orbiter. The filter will reject radiation from 300 nm to 5000 nm, leaving a very narrow opening around 617 nm with high transparency.




The third contract commissions the development of Linearly Variable Filters. These are small dimension optical components on which the special coating will determine very small windows of transparency, possessing a regular (and linear) distance one from the other, both in Space and Frequency. The requirements for these components are highly demanding and currently not available on the market. However, these are necessary to help realize a new generation of spectrometers with reduced dimensions, as required for future space missions—Rome, Italy