High force grid! Application of LED in space

Mid Autumn Festival, the moon is essential. Space always brings us endless reverie. When you look at the moon, do you know what LED is used in space?

In our country, the application of LED in space is mainly responsible for military scientific research institutions and military enterprises. LED has been introduced in military applications, the army day and the second day of the parade, and now look at the application of LED in space between China and the United states.

China from the Shenzhou seven spacecraft (2008) began to apply LED in space lighting, is the world's first country! Space lighting, including cabin lighting, out of the cabin lighting, intersection lighting, rendezvous and docking with the Shenzhou spacecraft rendezvous with Tiangong-1.

The United States initially applied LED to a space farm, in which the United States may be more mature than the Chinese technology, and thus derived from other new applications.

1 cabin lighting

At present, the international space station in the cabin of the general lighting source for fluorescent lamps. Fluorescent lamp technology is mature, stable performance, high reliability, and has high luminous efficiency, luminous uniformity, low surface brightness. But its shortcomings are: Mercury, with strobe, not easy to light, short maintenance cycle. White light-emitting diode (LED) as a new light source, very suitable for space missions of the lighting system of high reliability and safety requirements, to replace the fluorescent lamp inside cabin lighting has many advantages: small volume, high luminous efficiency, quick start-up, start a wide temperature range, low voltage, no stroboscopic light and do not contain mercury; LED is easy to design special light distribution, the two optical system with high efficiency; seismic impact resistance; easy to achieve color and brightness control.

China uses LED cabin lighting, not only low temperature, but also shock resistance. Large temperature difference in space, day and night changes are very obvious, at night, the temperature is very low, the radiation of the particles in space is very strong, through the LED lamp special technology to achieve high reliability, high stability. All the lights in each cabin are from the top of a small lamp, the power consumption is only a few watts, for space saving space, load and energy consumption. The day and night long, space LED lights also have "dimming" function, can be adjusted according to the daily state of astronauts.

2 cabin lighting

Out of the cabin lights play an important role in astronaut spacewalk. The spacecraft entered orbit after a period of time in the shadow, then extravehicular astronauts Chucang walk very dark, there must be light, the camera system also needs lighting. Abroad, the general use of metal lamps to provide space out of cabin lighting, China is using LED. LED has the advantages of high luminous efficiency, high reliability, good seismic performance and long service life of up to 100 thousand hours.

Chinese LED cabin lights to solve the following technical problems: (1) the outer space environment is very complex, to shadow temperature at sixty or seventy degrees Celsius, the sunshine temperature is very high, a variety of space radiation and electrostatic, lighting must be under these harsh conditions. (2) Secondly, there is no air in the outer space, the illumination light source can not be used as the convection heat dissipation on the earth, so it is necessary to make full use of the technology of metal conduction and heat radiation. (3) space lighting system needs to achieve high efficiency, low power consumption".

LED out of the cockpit lighting looks like a square box, but the light emitting surface is a certain curvature of the polyhedron, the role of the light is focused on the area of illumination, lighting angle of about 160 degrees, up and down 90 degrees. Contains 24 light source, the total power consumption of 27 watts. Such a high-tech lighting system, the size is not large, placed in a width of about 20 cm, about 10 cm high, about 6 cm thick in the box, weighing about 1.8 kg.

3 intersection lighting

The Shenzhou spacecraft and Tiangong-1 docking is in shadow in the dark. The butt will produce a lot of collision, LED lamp withstood the test, providing protection for rendezvous and docking.

In the process of the Shenzhou spacecraft docking with Tiangong-1, the need for orbit and attitude adjustment according to the predetermined strategy, let the Shenzhou spacecraft with Tiangong-1 on time, gradually approaching, the sensor range and aim at the rendezvous and docking, the distance between the two gradually reduced to 0, to complete the rendezvous and docking. The sensor includes microwave radar, laser radar and CCD optical imaging sensor.

CCD optical imaging sensor, which is composed of a marking subsystem, a camera subsystem and a signal processing subsystem. The logo subsystem is mounted on a Tiangong-1, which is a graphic of a plurality of light emitting diode (LED) target lamps. LED low power consumption, small size, light weight, the impact of changes in ambient temperature is small, very suitable for use as a light emitting devices. The marker lamp is further divided into the far field marker lamp and the near field indicator lamp, which are assembled on the outer surface of the cabin near the interface of the Tiangong-1 experimental cabin. The far field indicator lamp is in the outer ring, and each lamp is far away from each other, which is used to ensure the measuring precision of the remote distance, and the near field mark lamp is in the inner ring to adapt the field of view of the CCD sensor lens when the distance is close. With the marker light, the spacecraft can be all-weather docking, even on the back of the yang side can also be carried out. In order to effectively eliminate the interference of sunlight and other stray light, the LED target lamp emits light in the near infrared band.

4 space farm

Growing food in space is a good solution to a major problem in long distance space travel: the supply of fresh food. In the short term, it can play a role