Related papers: MICROSCOPE instrument in-flight characterization
An aircraft's airspeed, angle of attack, and angle of side slip are crucial to its safety, especially when flying close to the stall regime. Various solutions exist, including pitot tubes, angular vanes, and multihole pressure probes.…
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has mapped the full sky in five frequency bands between 23 and 94 GHz. The primary goal of the mission is to produce high-fidelity, all-sky, polarization-sensitive maps that can be used to…
Microplasmas are operated around atmospheric pressure exhibiting pronounced non-equilibrium characteristics, i.e. they possess energetic electrons while ions and neutrals remain cold. They have gained significant interest due to their…
The autonomous operation of flexible-wing aircraft is technically challenging and has never been presented within literature. The lack of an exact modeling framework is due to the complex nonlinear aerodynamic relationships governed by the…
Kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs) have been proven as reliable systems for astrophysical observations, especially in the millimetre range. Their compact size enables to optimally fill the focal plane, thus boosting sensitivity. The KISS…
A number of experiments for measuring anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background use scanning strategies in which temperature fluctuations are measured along circular scans on the sky. It is possible, from a large number of such…
Experiments deploying large arrays of transition-edge sensors (TESs) often require a robust method to monitor gain variations with minimal loss of observing time. We propose a sensitive and non-intrusive method for monitoring variations in…
In this paper we examine the possibility of testing the equivalence principle, in its weak form, by analyzing the orbital motion of a pair of artificial satellites of different composition moving along orbits of identical shape and size in…
Aerial insects can effortlessly navigate dense vegetation, whereas similarly sized aerial robots typically depend on offboard sensors and computation to maintain stable flight. This disparity restricts insect-scale robots to operation…
Results are reported from the first flight of a new balloon-borne instrument, BAM (Balloon-borne Anisotropy Measurement), designed to search for cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy. The instrument uses a cryogenic differential…
The impact of formation flying on interferometry is growing over the years for the potential performance it could offer. However, it is still an open field, and many studies are still required. This article presents the basic principles…
We provide a method for detecting and localizing objects near a robot arm using arm-mounted miniature time-of-flight sensors. A key challenge when using arm-mounted sensors is differentiating between the robot itself and external objects in…
By measuring the fundamental constants in astrophysical objects one can test basic physical principles as space-time invariance of physical laws along with probing the applicability limits of the standard model of particle physics. The…
In order to test gravitation in the Solar System, it is necessary to improve the orbit restitution of interplanetary spacecrafts. The addition of an accelerometer on board is a major step toward this goal because this instrument measures…
In this paper, we introduce advances in the sensor suite of an autonomous flying insect robot (FIR) weighing less than a gram. FIRs, because of their small weight and size, offer unparalleled advantages in terms of material cost and…
The noise and drift requirements for a navigation-grade gyroscope are widely known, yet there is no simple analytic model of how the noise and drift of a gyroscope influence the fix displacement error (FDE) of an inertial navigation system…
Diagnostic activities, such as ultrasound scans and palpation, are relatively low-cost. They play a crucial role in the early detection of health problems and in assessing their progression. However, they are also error-prone activities,…
Commissioning of SCUBA-2 included a program of skydips and observations of calibration sources intended to be folded into regular observing as standard methods of source flux calibration and to monitor the atmospheric opacity and stability.…
Vibrations are a key source of image degradation in ground-based instrumentation, especially for high-contrast imaging instruments. Vibrations reduce the quality of the correction provided by the adaptive optics system, blurring the science…
We give the calibration and scientific performance parameters of the Planck Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) measured during the ground cryogenic test campaign. These parameters characterise the instrument response and constitute our best…