Spin-Out Brings Space Technology to Earth

Technology designed to measure water vapour on Mars is poised for use in a whole host of everyday applications here on Earth from monitoring food production or industrial gas emissions, to surveying volcanic ash clouds and even giving farmers a health check on their crops.

KEIT Ltd is a new spin out company from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) which grew from the need for an extremely compact but highly accurate spectrometer to measure gases in planetary atmospheres, that was also robust enough to withstand the harsh conditions in space.

Dr Hugh Mortimer, a research scientist at STFC’s RAL Space, and inventor of the technology said: “Mass is a real commodity on board space satellites, so we developed a very high performance spectrometer which was also extremely stable and compact. We quickly realised that there were also some very real non-space application opportunities for this, ranging from R&D, to food production, environmental monitoring and agriculture, just to name a few.  It’s the unique simplicity and stability of the spectrometer that we’ve developed here at STFC that makes it so versatile and powerful. This technology could transform how spectrometers are used, where they can be used and who uses them.”

This new generation of spectrometer is compact, lightweight, and has no moving parts, making it extremely stable and useful for many industrial application as well as R&D facilities the company said.