Visit to the Facilities

Visits to ESA facilities as well as Industrial facilities are an integral part of the School Curriculum allowing the students to “believe through seeing” real facilities that relate directly to the use of optics either at laboratory level or at spacecraft level. Visits can be physical on location or virtual from the lecture hall.

ESTEC Facilities

At the end of two days we will have the opportunity to:

- physical visit the ERASMUS building that hosts ESA activities on Human Spaceflight, Microgravity research and planetary Robotics.

- by virtual presentation, the ESA Spacecraft Test Centre which is located at a restricted area in ESTEC. Although virtual, the presentation allows us to see the test facilities from angles that is impossible to view during a physical visit.

Industrial visits

On Thursday 30 October and also on Saturday 1 November we will visit a number of locally based Space Companies to get an impression of a real environment where space hardware is built much of it in the area of Optics. On Thursday we plan to visit:

- AIRBUS, one of the main Spacecraft manufacturers world wide

- SRON, a Dutch Research and Technology Centre very active in manufacturing Optical Instruments for Space

On Saturday we will visit COSINE, a new company active in the area of miniature Space Optics instruments.

The EMORAL

During the week of the School the ESA Mobile Raman LIDAR (EMORAL) will be parked in ESTEC. Students will have the opportunity to see a real LIDAR system which ESA uses from ground and in different locations across Europe to probe the atmosphere and correlate the results with spaceborne operations.  EMORAL uses a Nd:YAG laser head, a 300 mm diameter Cassegrain telescope, and fast high-resolution transient recorders inside a mobile vehicle. The system ensures full operability across Europe and is constantly used for the cross-calibration of Lidar satellite missions such as the Aeolus or EarthCare missions. Three laser beams are emitted vertically into the atmosphere with a repetition rate of 10 Hz (the pulse length of 5-7 ns) at 1064, 532, and 355 nm with a pulse energy of about 100 mJ. The backwards scattered radiation is analysed using 8 channels: 3 elastic (1064,532,355 nm), 3 vibrational Raman (607,387 nm for N2 molecules and 408 nm for H2O particles) and 2 elastic depolarizing channels (532,355 nm) and simultaneously recorded with an analogue and photon-counting modes.