Well on track: Successful Interim Review Meeting
The team behind the GALACTIC project is well on track to reach its goal to develop reproducible, fully European-supplier-based functionally coated Alexandrite crystals that can be used in space. On 15 November 2022, the team has met up online for a successful second interim review meeting.
Our achievements so far: The crystals grown by Optomaterials and coated by Altechna have reached competitiveness on the global market. LZH has succeeded in demonstrating a laser with globally competitive characteristics. The crystals show a good reproducibility and laser performance, as well as having an optical quality comparable to the results achieved with non-EU crystals.
What is still to be done? To reach the desired TRL 6 we will use the last months to carry out the rest of the environmental test campaign. We have already irradiated the crystals with protons and will now expose them to gamma rays as well. Afterwards we characterize them. Finally, we will test how the coated crystals react to defined temperature cycles.