NASA Launches Lunar Flashlight: Week in Brief: 12/16/22

NASA’s Lunar Flashlight has communicated with mission controllers and confirmed it is healthy after launching Dec. 11 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The satellite embarked on a four-month journey to the moon to seek out surface water ice in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar south pole. Lunar Flashlight will use a reflectometer equipped with four lasers that emit near-infrared light in wavelengths readily absorbed by surface water ice. This is the first time that multiple colored lasers will be used to seek out ice inside these dark regions on the moon, which haven’t seen sunlight in billions of years. Should the lasers hit bare rock or regolith (broken rock and dust), the light will reflect back to the spacecraft. If the target absorbs the light, that would indicate the presence of water ice. The greater the absorption, the more ice there may be.

Illustration of NASA’s Lunar Flashlight with its four solar arrays deployed, shortly after launch. The small satellite, or SmallSat, will take about three months to reach its science orbit to seek out surface water ice in the darkest craters of the moon’s south pole. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands — EFFECT Photonics, a developer of highly integrated optical solutions, selected Fabrinet as its manufacturing partner for its integrated optical subassemblies. Fabrinet is a provider of high-precision optical, electronic, and mechanical manufacturing services for OEMs. As a manufacturing partner, Fabrinet will perform sourcing, procurement, assembly, test, and calibration of EFFECT Photonics’ integrated optical subassemblies. Lidar hardware and software solutions manufacturer Blickfeld tapped Fabrinet as its manufacturing partner last month.

KOMAKI, Japan — Santec Corp. will formally integrate Optotest into the Santec brand. Optotest, acquired in November 2021, will be renamed Santec California Corp. effective Jan. 9, 2023. The change will relate to the name and logo. The legal entity will be unchanged. The company will also launch a new website featuring the integrated product line.

AUSTIN, Texas — TAU Systems, a producer of ultrafast, compact plasma accelerators, established a partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to advance the science and technology of compact accelerator systems and advanced light sources. The goal of the partnership is to make these tools widely available to a broad range of end users and industry. Specifically, TAU and Berkeley Lab aim to demonstrate the first laser-driven vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) free electron laser in the U.S. The team will be using a 100-TW peak-power laser fitted with an undulator at one of BELLA center’s core facilities, the BELLA-HTU laser. The partnership follows news this month’s news that an international team in Europe demonstrated seeded free electron lasing in the UV based on laser-plasma acceleration.

WILMINGTON, Mass. — Photonics manufacturer Energetiq Technology will create a business unit for its extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light source products. The EUV business unit will assemble all the core technology, engineering, marketing, field service, and operations personnel under the management of Don McDaniel, who has served as Energetiq’s vice president of research and development since 2018. McDaniel’s title will be vice president and general manager, EUV. The company also announced that an R&D facility has been established in support of the EUV business unit at the headquarters of its parent company, Hamamatsu Photonics.

SAN DIEGO — PhenoVista Biosciences, a contract research organization and provider of imaging-based assay services, received a strategic investment from FUJIFILM Corp.’s life sciences corporate venture capital investment fund. The funding will accelerate the development of high-content screening assay services using FUJIFILM iCell differentiated induced pluripotent stem cells and PhenoVista’s imaging technologies.

FUJIFILM iCell motor neurons stained with Hoechst to identify nuclei (magenta) and with anti-Tuj1 to label neurites (cyan), imaged with a Yokogawa CQ1 automated microscope. Courtesy of Business Wire.

MUNICH — Lidar technology company Blickfeld expanded its international operations in China. To support operations on the ground, the company’s Shanghai Blickfeld Optoelectronics Technology branch opened an office in Shanghai. Mike Yang serves as its general manager. Yang holds more than 20 years of experience in the electronics industry, having held management roles at companies including General Electric, Osram, and Valeo Sylvania.

Mike Yang, general manager of Blickfeld Optoelectronics Technology (Shanghai). Courtesy of Blickfeld.

WALLINGFORD, Conn. — CPS Fluidics, a designer and manufacturer of microfluidic technologies, acquired Hexano Corp., a manufacturer and developer of microfluidic devices. Hexano’s founder, Andre Babineau, will serve as vice president of sales at CPS Fluidics.

AUBURN, Mass. — Physik Instrumente will invest $16 million in the expansion of its Eschbach, Germany-based factory. The site will gain approximately 6600 sq ft of production, lab, and office space, and is expected to accommodate the addition of 150 personnel. The measures will reportedly triple the site’s production capacity. The facility is the PI Group’s competency center for precision linear and rotary motion stages, as well as custom high-precision automation solutions, including mechanics, drives, motion controllers, and software.

A rendering of PI’s expanded factory in Eschbach in the southwest region of Germany. Courtesy of Harsch Bau GmbH.

SHEFFIELD, England — Aegiq, a startup developing solutions for wide-scale adoption of quantum technologies, launched U-Quant, a project in partnership with the Luxmoore Lab from the University of Exeter. Both partners are building on a successful collaboration within the U.K.’s Quantum Communications Hub. The project will deliver improved space communication capability by leveraging the benefits of quantum light sources, as well as exploring novel materials for single-photon generation. The project is funded by Innovate UK.