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In a corner of the Riga Technical University campus, a team of scientists is working on a technology that could one day stop asteroids from crashing to Earth.
High-precision hand-built timers in the laboratory of Latvian start-up Eventech are currently being used to track satellites.
This year, the company won a contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop timers that will investigate the possibility of redirecting an asteroid before it gets too close to our planet for convenience.
NASA plans to launch the first part of the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission – known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – on July 22, 2021 on a Falcon 9 rocket belonging to the Space X of tech tycoon Elon Musk.
The 500 kilogram (1,100 lb) camera-equipped probe will fly into an asteroid called Didymos and crash into it, trying to blow it out of its current course that will see it pass close to Earth in 2123.
Eventech’s deep space event timers are being developed for the next HERA mission, which is expected to launch five years later, to determine if the first mission was successful.
Read also: Australian telescope maps deep space at record speed
‘Go boldly’
“Our new technology that will follow ESA’s second spacecraft called HERA will measure whether the first impact took the kilometer-sized Didymos off its previous path, avoiding harm to humanity,” Eventech engineer told AFP. Imants Pulkstenis at the laboratory.
“It is far more interesting to boldly go where no man has gone before than to produce mundane consumer electronics for a huge profit,” he added, borrowing the famous slogan from Star Trek, the 1960s science fiction television series.
Eventech timers are part of a space technology tradition in the Baltic state that dates back to Soviet times, when Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, was launched in 1957.
They measure the time it takes for a pulse of light to travel to an orbiting object and back.
Eventech devices can record the measurement within a picosecond – or a trillionth of a second – which allows astronomers to convert a time measurement into a distance measurement with an accuracy of up to two millimeters.
Read also: NASA Osiris-Rex spacecraft “leaps” asteroid Bennu in historic mission
Sending timers into deep space
About 10 timers are produced each year and are used in observatories around the world.
They follow the increasingly crowded atmosphere of Earth, filled with a new crop of private satellites alongside traditional scientific and military ones.
“Monitoring all of them requires tools,” said Pavels Razmajevs, Eventech’s chief operations officer.
Although Latvia only became a full member of ESA in 2016, its engineers have followed satellites since the Soviet era.
The University of Latvia also has its own satellite laser beam station in a forest south of Riga.
Eventech engineers said they use analog parts as much as possible, mainly because the microchips take nanoseconds to calculate the signal, which is too long for input measurements that go in picoseconds.
The physical length of the motherboard can also affect how fast the signal travels from one circuit to another.
While these timers are used for calculations on Earth, a different device for deep space missions is being developed in another corner of the same lab to track planetary objects from a moving space probe.
“There is no GPS data coverage on other planets, so you have to take your measurement accuracy with you,” said Pulkstenis.
Developing deep space devices will be a complex task, but Eventech’s engineers are enjoying it.
“Our updated technology must withstand extreme temperatures in space and extreme cosmic radiation,” said Pulkstenis. “It’s a fun challenge”.
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