PI Wins Contract for Positioning Systems

PI (Physik Instrumente) LP of Auburn, Mass., has received an order to supply 25 six-axis hexapod alignment systems and motion controllers to Vertex Antenna Systems, a unit of General Dynamics C4 Systems, based in Scottsdale, Ariz. The customized high-precision micropositioning systems will be used to align the secondary reflectors in 25 12-m telescopes. The devices represent the North American contribution to the Atacama Large Millimeter Array radio telescope, an international project under construction in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Scheduled for completion in 2011, the astronomical telescope is expected to provide spatial resolution 10 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope.