132 grams to communicate with Mars
On behalf of the ESA, UCLouvain has developed antennas for the LaRa instrument that will go to Mars in 2020 to study the red planet's habitability. From concept to creation, the antennas were manufactured in three months - quite a feat! The originality of UCLouvain's concept: the antennas are produced from a single block of aluminium to achieve lightness (132g!), miniaturisation (hand-sized) and great resistance (particularly to day-night temperature variations of more than 200° C). Dust storms, ionising cosmic radiation, extreme cold at night. Mars is not very hospitable! It's for these extreme conditions that the research team of Christophe Craeye, a professor at the UCLouvain Louvain School of Engineering, developed antennas for the 'LaRa' measuring instrument (Lander Radioscience ), which will go to Mars in 2020 . Prof. Craeye's laboratory has been producing antennas for more than 15 years , for various uses: road radars, magnetic resonance imaging, tracking objects equipped with radiofrequency identification (RFID) chips. The goal is always the same: retrieve remotely data sent by a measuring instrument (of a vehicle's speed, the body's internal functions, an object's or individual's location, etc. For this expertise, as part of the ExoMars mission, the European Space Agency (ESA) contacted (via Antwerp Space) UCLouvain. The mission's purpose is to study the rotation of Mars in order to learn more about the composition of its core and determine whether the planet was/will someday be habitable. How?
