Abstract
In this chapter, we introduce the heterodyne technique and its early history. The Herschel-HIFI instrument involved two important technical lineages that were just emerging at the time of the initial mission proposal to ESA in 1982: superconducting mixers and local oscillator (LO) devices. We review the 15 years of progress and development carried out to advance these technologies before the HIFI instrument project began in 1997. The status and performance of the HIFI instrument are reviewed, and HIFI’s huge improvements in sensitivity and broad frequency coverage, securing both the robustness and reliability, which are mandatory for a successful space mission, are discussed. Like the other two Herschel instruments, HIFI represents a powerful example of how enabling technology and programmatic opportunities can fruitfully interact in a space project.
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Notes
- 1.
Superconductor-insulator-superconductor
- 2.
Hot electron bolometer
- 3.
I-V curve describes the relationship between current and voltage in an electronic device, also called current-voltage characteristic.
- 4.
Noise is a random fluctuation in an electrical signal.
- 5.
Noise temperature is the temperature difference between two black bodies that can be detected by a heterodyne mixer per unit time (1 s) and bandwidth (Hz). The number decreases with observing time (t) as 1/√t and increased bandwidth (ΔIF) as 1/√ΔIF.
- 6.
ALMA , the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, is an interferometer based in Chile and consists of 66 radio telescopes operating at millimetre and submillimetre wavelengths.
- 7.
SOFIA : Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy
- 8.
GREAT: German Receiver for Astronomy at Terahertz Frequencies
- 9.
Component and/or breadboard critical function verification in relevant environment (level 5) to model demonstrating the critical functions of the element in a relevant environment (level 6)
- 10.
Carcinotron is the brand name for the BWOs produced by Thomson-CSF in France. Russia is the other main supplier of BWOs with similar characteristics as Carcinotrons except that the oscillation starts at lower voltages, but using them requires more skills. Their highest oscillation frequency reported to date is 1.5 THz.
- 11.
Schottky diode (named after German physicist Walter H. Schottky) is a semiconductor diode formed by the junction of a semiconductor with a metal.
- 12.
UKIRT: United Kingdom Infrared Telescope
- 13.
Onsala rymdobservatorium or Onsala space observatory, located at 45 km south of Göteborg, is the Swedish national facility for radio astronomy and depends on Chalmers University of Technology.
- 14.
The main participants in the TRP programme in the 1990s were Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden; DEMIRM/Observatoire de Paris , IRAM-Grenoble, LETI-CEA Grenoble, France; Farran Technology Ltd, Ireland; KOSMA /University of Cologne, Radiometer Physics GmbH (RPG), Germany; SRON /University of Groningen and University of Delft, the Netherlands; Technical University of Denmark; University of Cambridge, UK, with contributions from IREE and MSPU, Moscow, Russia.
- 15.
X-band: radio frequency band between 8 and 12 GHz
- 16.
Initially with DEMIRM that became LERMA
- 17.
HEMT is a high-electron mobility transistor used for amplifying current.
- 18.
MMIC stands for monolithic microwave integrated circuit
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Minier, V. et al. (2017). Heterodyne Technology in Submillimetre Astronomy: Towards Implementation in Herschel . In: Inventing a Space Mission. ISSI Scientific Report Series, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60024-6_8
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