UC Berkeley/NASA satellite set to launch June 7 on two-year mission to study solar flares 01 June 2001 By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley Media Relations and Susan Hendrix, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center* Spectrum Astro Inc., of Phoenix, Ariz., provided the spacecraft electronics, the satellite skeleton (called the spacecraft bus) and integration support.
* Tecomet, a subsidiary of Thermo Electron, Inc., Waltham, Mass., and van Beek Consultancy of the Netherlands, supplied the tungsten and molybdenum imaging grids for the instrument. Tecomet used new microfabrication techniques to create slits in the grids as narrow as 20 microns - less than one thousandth of an inch.
* The ORTEC division of PerkinElmer Instruments provided the largest and most advanced array of germanium detectors ever flown in space. The nine germanium crystals, one under each pair of grids, were artificially grown to be pure to over one part in a trillion. They are maintained at a temperature of -324 degrees Fahrenheit (-198 Celsius) using a new type of mechanical cooler manufactured by Sunpower, Inc., that has never before been flown in space.
