News

All the Callisto Team wishes you a Happy, Healthy, and Prosperous 2019!

Callisto has successfully delivered the prototype unit of its new Ultra QRFH Cryogenic receiver fo VLBI to the BKG, VLBI team at Wettzell (Germany). This is a significant milestone for Callisto with a bold move on cryogenic LNA receivers design for wideband operations. This new product presents innovative capabilities for customers all around the world.

As part of the R & T plan for the year 2018 (TC7 technical axis), Callisto is developing for the CNES a Q-band LNA module dedicated to ground station.

After its attendance at ISD ESTEC in Noordwijk on the last 11 & 12th of September, Callisto is continuing its European tour with its participation in European Microwave Week, which provides access to the very latest products, research and initiatives in the microwave sector, on the 25 & 26th September, booth 248, in Madrid, Spain.

On that event Callisto is going to present its cryo feed system project carried out with the partnership of the University of Cantabria Wednesday 25th of September between 5.10 and 5.30 PM.

This paper describes the design of a ground station antenna feed system, that includes feed horn, polarizer, rejection filter, mono-pulse tracking coupler and low noise amplifiers with polarisation switching. The entire feed system assembly is cooled to cryogenic temperature (T < 10 K) in order to maximise the G/T of the ground station antenna (3dB/K gained). The cryogenic cooling system described is fully redundant and this novel design allows one cryocooler to be removed and replaced, while the other cryocooler is still running. The design has been submitted for patent protection.

At the recent Industry Space Days 2018 Celestia Technology Group companies C-STS, Callisto,  and TTI  collaborated on their exhibition presence across the two-day event. The Group presented the new Modems programs for multi-constellations, multi-functional datalink, an innovative e-Scan BFN antenna for multi-satellite tracking and the GaN SSPA and LNA Cryogenics for the next generation of satellite communications.

ISD 2018 had large industrial participation of more than 200 exhibitors and 1000 companies attending including a high number of SMEs, indicating a growth of smaller companies in the space technologies sector. Conference sessions at the event covered Cubesat, additive manufacturing and PLATO missions’ procurements.

As part of a French consortium, Callisto joins the SKA Organization

SKA? The acronym stands for the largest radio telescope ever imagined. This international project of low and medium frequency radio telescopes plans to build  with a collector area of ​​one square kilometer. Coordinated by the CNRS, the SKA-France consortium has just become the 12th member of SKA-O, which is the  organization responsible for the feasibility study and design of the telescope project. The SKA-France consortium  includes five research organizations (the CNRS, the universities of Bordeaux and Orléans, the observatories of Paris and the Côte d'Azur) as well as seven industrialists (Air Liquide, ATOS-Bull, Callisto, CNIM, Kalray, TAS). Several French laboratories have participated in technical preparatory studies for the project, some since the beginning in 2012. Once operational, the SKA, or "Square Kilometer Array", should allow to perceive the traces of the creation of the Universe 15 billions years ago.

Callisto supplied  the Cryogenic & Ambient LNAs at 26 GHZ GHz band for the ESA Snowbear project : a Svalbard ground station for wide-band  earth observation data reception.

Due to congestion in the Earth Exploration Service (EES) at X-Band (8.0-8.4 GHz) and  (7.75-7.9 GHz) used today by most Earth Observation satellites for payload  data downlinks and the increase in required downlink data rates, ESA has embarked on the  technology preparation for the exploitation of the 26 GHz band by future Earth Observation  missions. The Agency will use this band operationally for the first time in a polar orbit mission  for the EUMETSAT Metop-SG spacecrafts (first Launch in 2021), currently under development by ESA. The purpose of the SNOWBEAR project (Svalbard grouNd StatiOn for Wide Band Earth observation dAta Reception) is to de-risk the introduction of the new 26 GHz band taking advantage of the outcome of a number of activities already carried out by the ESA Ground Station Engineering team (OPS-GS) as part of the 26 GHz Technology  Roadmap and use them on a pre-operational scenario. 

For this project, Callisto provided a 26GHz dual channel Cryogenic  and Ambient LNAs. As a result, this allowed to obtain a G/T  > 37.2 dB/K for the Cryogenic LNA and  a G/T  > 35.3 dB/K for the Ambient Temperature LNA (considering 5 degree elevation and 0.25 Cumulative Distribution).

Callisto will attend the 6th TSS, the international gathering for space stakeholders between 26-28th June, booth B19, at Centre de Congrès Pierre Baudis in Toulouse.