Description
Department of Physical Electronics is a technical university department with a long heritage in space related projects under various roofs of Interkosmos, NASA and other space agencies. The department was coordinating the world satellite laser ranging (SLR) network for 20 years, it contributed to planetary missions to Mars and to laser time transfer missions of CNES, NASA, China, and ESA mostly with detectors based on Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD).
Competences and capabilities
In pure space segment the department capabilities cover single photon counting in space (from EUV to near IR) for altimetry, ranging, lidar or laser time transfer, x-ray optics and diagnostics. In the ground segment it has a long term experience with picosecond instrumentation for SLR, i.e. picosecond photon counters, picosecond laser sources, sub-picosecond event timing, and in on-site timing calibration of SLR stations worldwide.
Products/Services
- detectors for single photon counting (ranging, altimetry, lidar) in space in VIS and IR
- single x-ray quantum detection, x-ray optics, and imaging methods for EUV and soft x-ray
- sub-picosecond event timing
Major Space Projects & References
- Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) – ground segment network (Interkosmos)
- Portable Calibration Standard for SLR network – (Czech and various national grant agencies)
- Mars 92, Mars Polar Lander 98 – planetary altimeter & LIDAR (Russia, NASA)
- T2L2 @ Jason2 – on-board detector for laser time transfer (CNES, NASA)
- LTT @ BeiDou 2 / Compass – on-board detectors for picosecond laser time transfer (China)
- X-ray Optics and Diagnostics – research activity (FP7Space)
- European Laser Timing (ELT) – on-board SPAD based detector for ISS module ACES – (ELIPS 3)
Space Related Equipment, Labs & Certificates
- Solid state single photon detectors with picosecond temporal resolution, multi-wavelenghts picosecond laser systems, femtosecond event timers, UTC GPS receivers, frequency sources, multipliers and distributors
- EUV tabletop source, single quantum detectors, spectrometers and imaging detectors