SPACE IT UP (SIU) is the italian partnership financed within the PNRR programme aiming at fostering the innovation and developing the technology for space exploration. The project, including 9 research lines (spokes) focuses on the space exploration on the investigation of extraterrestrial habitats, on the development of techonolgy for satellitar systems, on the protection of the Earth.
The SIU consortium includes 33 entities, pubblic e private, among them the National Council of Research, and is coordinated by the Politecnico di Torino.
The Istituto Nazionale di Ottica, and the ILIL laboratory, is involved in Spoke 1: Satellitar Systems, and in particolar in the WP 2: Very Low-Earth Orbit (VLEO) Platforms: Pushing the Envelope of Earth Observation.
The CNR will provide to the SIU partnership instrumentation, technologies and competences for the characterization of advanced materials and instruments to be used in VLEO platforms, in order to assure a high performance in extreme environmental conditions.
In this framework, the ILIL lab at CNR-INO is developing a platform for the irradiation of materials with high energy radiation (X-rays and gamma-ray) and high-energy particles (electrons, ions). The beams are obtained via the irradiation of ultraintense (1018-1021 W/cm2) ultrashort Ti:Sa CPA 240 TW laser pulses with gas or solid targets. The facility is able to provide controlled doses of electrons bunches in the 100s MeV range accelerated via Laser WakeField Acceleration and protons/ions beams with energy up to 10 MeV per nucleon. The platform can therefore be used to test the tolerance of materials to controlled doses of radiation and particles.