Thales Travelling Wave Tubes Equip Sentinel-1B
Sentinel 1B, the second satellite in the Sentinel 1 series was successfully launched last night at 21:02 GMT. Constructed by Thales Alenia Space and equipped with Thales Electron Devices’s X-band travelling wave tubes (TWTs), the satellite was launched with a Soyuz rocket from the Guiana Space Centre.
The two Sentinel1 satellites (A&B) are part of the European Earth observation programme ‘Copernicus’ and give Europe a ‘radar vision’ of the Earth.
Sentinel 1 is designed to monitor environmental events such as landslides, forest fires and floods. It will also supply information to support aid missions during natural disasters when rapid access to information is essential.
Furthermore, data from the satellites can be used to evaluate long term environmental trends such as melting ice caps and rising sea levels.
Thales's X-band TWTs are installed on the satellite to enable the transmission of scientific data for analysis.
Click here to learn more about our microwave components for space applications