Rosetta spacecraft parts manufactured in Lincoln
Just had a quick phone call from my mate Terry that almost gave me a mild orgasm. Years ago we worked at a company called Marconi Electronic Devices (MEDL) in Lincoln. I ran the radiation hard components product line and Terry was the chief designer. Terry reminded me of the Rosetta spacecraft parts manufactured in Lincoln.
We used a technology called Silicon on Sapphire (SOS). This was manufactured just like a normal silicon chip/semiconductor except that the substrate was Sapphire, an insulation material. SOS was extremely resistant to the effects of the radiation that satellites encounter in space and was therefore in great demand for many projects.
They were halcyon days. I’d get trips to glamorous locations all over the world working on exciting projects. These projects still come back to roost from time to time as they are all long term missions – Space is a very big place.
The last one to surface was the Cassini mission which landed a probe on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. We made the spacecraft processor for the Titan lander. It was a 3 MIP 32 bit processor called the MA31750 – used the old Mil Std 1750A software instruction set.
Although the company is now long gone and wasn’t really a great employer the people were terrific. I still have some SOS wafers containing 31750 die at home. If I remember I’ll take some photos. They’re in the attic somewhere.
We also made memory chips (64KB) and other peripherals – the idea being that you could design the whole processor board using our parts.
It opened doors all over the world. I met astronaut Buzz Aldrin and even went along to Moscow by invitation of the VP of the Russian Space Agency to give a talk – in front of Russia’s top space scientist. Also did a talk at CERN for scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project which has been in the news of late.
Now we have Rosetta. It’s hugely funky to be able to say I was part of that project. I have loads of stories from that time but I feel as if you’ve indulged me enough.
If I can dig out more on the Rosetta electronics I’ll share it.
Purely coincidentally Terry and I went to see the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum on Tuesday morning after the Albert Hall Pylons Gig. Cool stuff 🙂
