Magazine

Pittman® Series 8690™ brush-commutated DC motors from AMETEK Technical & Industrial Products (Kent, OH) are 26-mm motors for data storage, medical, semiconductor processing, automation, and other high-performance applications. The iron core DC motors incorporate bonded neodymium iron boron magnets, and include 7-slot skewed armatures,...

ASM Sensors (Elmhurst, IL) offers the PMIR7 series POSIROT® incremental en coder magnet rings in three sizes for different shaft sizes. They yield up to 184,320 pulses per revolution in conjunction with the quadrature encoder read head. The encoder system consists of a magnetoresistive read head, PMIS4, and a dual-channel...

The Motion Base Shuttle Mission Simulator (MBSMS) Strain System is an innovative engineering tool used to monitor the stresses applied to the MBSMS motion platform tilt pivot frames during motion simulations in real time. The Strain System comprises hardware and software produced by...

An apparatus, denoted the “retractuator” (a contraction of “retracting actuator”), was designed to help ensure clean separation between the cruise stage and the entry-vehicle subsystem of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. The retractuator or an equivalent mechanism is...

The NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) requires state-of-the-art frequency references that are derived and distributed from very stable atomic frequency standards. A new Frequency Reference System (FRS) and Frequency Reference Distribution System (FRD) have been developed, which...

An indium phosphide MMIC (monolithic microwave integrated circuit) mixer was developed, processed, and tested in the NGC 35-nm-gate-length HEMT (high electron mobility transistor) process. The MMIC mixers were tested and assembled in the miniature MMIC receiver module described in “Miniature...

The planar GaAs Shottky diode frequency multiplier is a critical technology for the local oscillator (LO) for submillimeter-wave heterodyne receivers due to low mass, tenability, long lifetime, and room-temperature operation. The use of a W-band (75–100 GHz) power amplifier...

Research findings were reported from an investigation of new gallium nitride (GaN) monolithic millimeter-wave integrated circuit (MMIC) power amplifiers (PAs) targeting the highest output power and the highest efficiency for class-A operation in W-band (75–110 GHz). W-band PAs are a...

A monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) receiver can be used as a building block for next-generation radio astronomy instruments that are scalable to hundreds or thousands of pixels. W- band (75–110 GHz) low-noise receivers are needed for radio astronomy interfer- ometers and spectrometers,...