DTU-ESA Spherical Near-Field Antenna Test Facility

Testing inside the DTU-ESA Spherical Near-Field Antenna Test Facility (SNFTF) at the Technical University of Denmark. This is one of ESA’s external laboratories, specialist centres of excellence located across Europe, supplementing the Agency’s in-house facilities. The SNFTF can sample an antenna’s surrounding electrical field in close-up on a highly accurate basis in all directions, then extrapolate these values to its far-off performance. 

This photo, taken around the end of 2005, shows testing to part of the MIRAS antenna, flown in space in 2009 aboard ESA's SMOS mission. Associate Professor Sergey N. Pivnenko, manager of the DTU-ESA Facility, is seen in the foreground, with Jerzy Lemanczyk, ESA’s then technical officer for the SMOS antenna, directing down the light upon it.