Dr. Mark L. Schattenburg, James Carter, Robert C. Fleming, Edward Murphy, Professor Claude R. Canizares and Professor Henry I. Smith. This information would be valuable in order to safeguard the health of orbiting satellites, and ensure the stability of our nation's electric power grid. Filters that allow the passage of low-energy neutral atoms but block UV light are essential for the performance of this instrumentation. The tall, narrow slots in the gratings behave as lossy waveguides at or below cutoff, providing UV discrimination to particles on the order of millions. Additional masking steps followed by nickel plating fabricate the mesh support structure, and a chemical etching step yields mesh-supported gratings suitable for space use.
Additional processing is required to align and bond the gratings to frames suitable for space use.
Concept of UV filtering by means of a metal freestanding grating. As a result of polarization and waveguide effects, UV is blocked while allowing the passage of atoms. In this way, UV background counts on the atom detector are avoided. Scanning-electron micrograph image of a UV blocking grating.