Last Friday 26th of October, the team of students that designed and manufactured the spot-on tests setup have received two rewards (each worth 2500 Euro) during the annual NLF gala. They received both the Jan Dullaert price for the best subject and the André Kuypers price for the best space related project. The latter was handed over by the Dutch astronaut André Kuypers himself.
During a short discussion after the reward ceremony it became clear that the price was granted because of the excellent quality of work delivered and the craftmanship exhibited by the instrument builders trained at the Leidse instrumentmakers school (Instrument builders school of Leiden LIS).
4 years of intensive training and practical work have payed off for these young professionals in the sense that they have shown to be able to not only study and design, but also build a complicated precision setup intended to measure the temperature coefficient of BiSon64-ET sunsensors in vacuum over a temperature range of -125°C to +125°C. Due to this wide temperature range and the desire to test as many sensors as possible in a single go (to save time and money) a highly specialized setup was needed which is vacuum compatible, has a low thermal mass and a high thermal conductivity. very challenging requirements which have been met by means of a technically sophisticated solution.
At Lens R&D we are proud of their success and happy with the project results.