Focal Plane Assemblies (FPA)
Lidax
Custom-designed focal plane assemblies carrying detector arrays for space telescopes and X-ray/IR/UV/visible instruments, flown on ESA's PLATO and BepiColombo missions.
Key figurescomparable across the catalogue
- TRL
- 9
Normalised to common units so this product can be compared with others in its category. The supplier's own wording is below.
As published by the supplier
- Flight heritage
- 26 Focal Plane Assemblies delivered for ESA PLATO mission (all telescopes); focal plane for MIXS instrument on ESA BepiColombo
- Interface
- Custom detector array integration (CCD/CMOS) tailored to host instrument
- TRL
- 9 (flight-proven on PLATO and BepiColombo)
About
LIDAX designs, develops and manufactures custom focal plane assemblies that capture faint celestial signals or fine Earth-observation detail, providing sensitivity and data collection across infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-ray bands. The flagship program is ESA’s PLATO exoplanet-hunting mission, for which LIDAX developed and manufactured the focal plane assemblies carrying the CCD sensors for all 26 PLATO telescopes. LIDAX also built the focal plane for the Mercury Imaging X-ray Spectrometer (MIXS) instrument on ESA’s BepiColombo mission to Mercury, and continues focal-plane development work for the ARRAKIHS dark-matter observation mission. Each focal plane assembly is engineered to the specific optical, thermal and mechanical requirements of its host instrument, integrating detector arrays with precision mounting and thermal control.
Documentation
No public datasheet yet — request the datasheet / ICD from the supplier.