Eyes for the OWL

Stourport, Worcestershire-based ceramic component maker Morgan Advanced Ceramics has secured a contract with Photek to supply hexagonal ceramic insulators for intensifiers used in NASA’s OWL mission.

OWL is the world’s first earth-orbiting system designed to study air showers initiated by ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR).  The use of ceramic in the OWL’s ‘eyes’ will allow an accurate image of these particles to be generated and will enable scientists to make significant discoveries about their origins - whether they are harbingers of new physics, associated with hidden dimensions, or generated high-density trapped defects of space left over from the Big Bang.

When UHECRs enter the Earth’s atmosphere, a disk of ultraviolet fluorescence flashes through the night’s sky, travelling at nearly the speed of light, and lasting for only a few tens of microseconds. The OWL’s eyes must therefore be large so they collect as much of the UV signal as possible and it is essential that the intensifiers are accurate to show a true representation of the UV light.