e2v wins CCD contract for major China telescope project
Chelmsford, England, July 7, 2004--e2v technologies has been awarded a contract to supply 36 image sensors to the Chinese Large sky-Area Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) project. The ground-based initiative is a major undertaking for astronomers in China, aiming to observe objects in the sky across a very wide area.
The contract to supply 36 4k x 4k charge-coupled devices (CCDs) to LAMOST's fiber-fed spectrograph was signed on 22 June, 2004. Next year e2v will begin delivery of the devices, which were designed and manufactured in-house. The sensors will be used to capture images of faint objects during spectral surveys of large areas of the sky. The telescope is expected to take tens of thousands of objects' spectra each night using a 5º field of view, which could make it the world's most powerful survey tool of its kind.
e2v worked closely with its local distributor, Tangram Electronic Engineering Co. (Beijing, China), to win this deal. Tangram's Robert Shen attended the contract signing ceremony in China along with Yongheng Zhao, general manager of the LAMOST project, as well as an eminent astronomer. "We hope the e2v CCDs in the LAMOST telescope will work at distances up to approximately 17,000 million light years," said Zhao. "In achieving this, the CCDs could help scientists further understand how the Universe started. We hope this could be the start of a new episode of collaboration between scientists from both home and abroad."
The imaging devices for LAMOST are built upon e2v's CCD42 and CCD44 ranges of astronomy chips, 250 of which have been supplied to observatories around the world. The size, double the area of existing devices, makes the sensor suitable for spectroscopy applications and single-chip focal-plane applications for modest-sized imagers.
This is the largest contract for e2v's new 4k x 4k devices for an astronomy project to date, although the company is also under contract to supply them to NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory space program, which will launch a spacecraft in 2007. Similar e2v projects include supply of 40 CCDs to the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, ongoing supply to the Kepler planet-finding mission and selection for Gaia (a European Space Agency mission to map 1 billion stars, due to launch in 2010)--at 0.5 m2, one of the largest focal planes of CCDs ever built either on earth or in space.