Radboud University of Nijmegen (RUN) is providing a payload for the Stratos II rocket. The experiment is initially aimed to observe ionospheric radio emission and man-made RFI, but would be further investigated for space radio interferometry.

Moreover, the antenna on-board Stratos II will be used for an interferometric measurement to determine the location of the rocket very precisely, where the antenna is one part of an array of antennas on the ground.

This payload mainly includes a radio antenna, analogue front-end circuit and a high performance digital receiver that has been build by the researchers at astronomy department of RUN. The digitizer is a novel minimal design of a receiver for space radio astronomy, which will be used for future radio projects like SKA or “LOFAR on the moon“. This digitizer is made in a cube-sat size and provides us with a low-power, high-performance multiprocessor hardware/software system for radio astronomy experiments. The hardware is a unique design in terms of power requirement and computation performances, as a high-speed dual-core ARM-based processor is utilized for computation purpose, while dynamic supply voltage and frequency scaling could be applied for power reduction. This hardware setup is accompanied with a high-resolution ADC module, adaptive matching circuit and front-end analogue electronics.

Team from Nijmegen integrating their module

This is the first time that radio astronomy hardware will fly on a rocket and it is actually the first for a Dutch astronomy project. Hence the Stratos II experiment is considered as the first step towards a radio telescope on the moon as one ultimate goal of researchers at RUN.

Author: Hamid Pourshaghaghi (Researcher at the Radboud University of Nijmegen)
Contactdetails: H.Pourshaghaghi@astro.ru.nl