CPI Canada to develop Ka-band extended interaction klystron

Georgetown, Canada – Communications & Power Industries Canada Inc. (CPI Canada) has been awarded a $3.3 million contract from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to fund the design modifications and development of a Ka-band extended interaction klystron (EIK) for the Surface Water & Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission.

 

The SWOT mission is a joint mission between NASA and the French Space Agency (CNES) that is focused on a better understanding of the world's oceans and its terrestrial surface waters. U.S. and French oceanographers and hydrologists have joined forces, with assistance from Canada and the United Kingdom, to develop this new space mission in order to conduct the first global survey of Earth's surface water, observe the fine details of the oceans' surface topography, and measure how bodies of water change over time. The SWOT mission will use wide-swath altimetry technology to produce high-resolution elevation measurements of the ocean surface and the surface of lakes, reservoirs, and wetlands. The mission, currently planned for launch in 2020, is expected to be of great utility to Environment Canada for hydrological and meteorological monitoring and forecasting and to Fisheries and Oceans Canada for ocean science and forecasting.

 

NASA will provide the SWOT payload module, which will include the 35GHz radar interferometer (KaRIn) instrument. With CPI Canada's 35GHz EIK, CSA will provide the enabling technology for the space-based radar.

 

"Scientists' current ability to measure the changing amount of water held in lakes is limited, as only 15% of Earth's lakes are presently measured from space. The SWOT mission will inventory more than one million bodies of water in Canada, and it is expected to yield a better understanding of how climate-induced changes can impact freshwater resources worldwide," said Joe Caldarelli, president of CPI Canada. "Using CPI Canada's high-power EIK to enable the SWOT radar, the mission can collect more complete water information. For the past decade, CPI Canada has been working with several international space agencies to develop the technology necessary for this vital program, and we look forward to continuing to contribute to the SWOT mission."

 

CPI Canada has extensive experience in supporting climate research from space through its participation in previous programs with space agencies around the world. CPI Canada provided a space-qualified 94GHz EIK for the cloud-profiling radar on-board NASA's CloudSat, an Earth Observation satellite that was launched in April 2006; the EIK on that program has exceeded its design life expectancy fourfold. CPI Canada also provided the pulsed amplifier for the EarthCARE space mission, an Earth Explorer Core mission of the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Living Planet Program, which is an advanced joint mission between the ESA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan, to address the need for better comprehension of the interaction between the aerosol, cloud, and radiative processes that play a role in climate regulation. For both the CloudSat and EarthCARE missions, CPI Canada's EIK amplifies low-power radar signals and converts them to high-power radar pulses, which are transmitted into the Earth's atmosphere by the cloud-profiling radar.

 

CPI Canada pioneered and developed EIK technology at its Georgetown, Ontario, facility and has sold more than 1,000 commercial EIKs for use in millimeter wave radar, communications systems and scientific applications.