On July 10th a PIPP-meeting has taken place at TU Delft in collaboration with its partner institutes. PIPP stands for The NWO Principal Investigator Preparatory Program and is focused on Breakthrough technologies for Interferometry in Space. Interferometry is a key technology in which the Netherlands have a long tradition and a leading role in the world. The Westerbork radio telescope, the LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) and SKA (Square Kilometer Array) radio telescopes are examples of this. Ground-based radio observations will eventually have their counterpart in space, not only to circumvent the disturbances associated with the Earth atmosphere, but ultimately to reach high spatial resolution in basically all wavelength domains.
It is the purpose of this PIPP-meeting to further integrate knowledge, skills and mission driven research to enable the combination of multiple satellites into one single virtual scientific instrument. Breakthroughs are expected in localization, high-data rate links, distributed computing, satellite cluster control and many more technologies. They will enable many different commercial and scientific multi satellite missions in the future. Two scientific missions, the Moon orbiting radio telescope OLFAR and the two-element THz interferometer EHI will be used as drivers and precursors for the research.