TIE Fighter down

A Star Wars TIE Fighter landed at last weekend’s ESA Open Days at ESTEC in the Netherlands, taking up residence in our Hertz radio-frequency test chamber, where it was seen by more than 8 000 visitors over Saturday and Sunday.

The theme of the Open Days was ‘Science Fiction Gets Real’. As all Imperial recruits would know, the TIE in TIE Fighter stands for Twin Ion Engine, and in real life ESA makes regular use of ion engine technology: the ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission is currently cruising to Mercury thanks to its onboard ion thrusters.

The full-sized TIE Fighter appeared courtesy of German fan group Project X-1. To see how it got into the Hertz chamber, check out this time-lapse video.

Hertz is usually used to test the radio performance of satellites, including radar instruments’ ability to survey Earth or other planets, or the efficiency of onboard radio systems linking back to Earth.

 Part of ESA’s technical heart in the Netherlands, the metal-walled ‘Hybrid European Radio Frequency and Antenna Test Zone’ chamber is shut off from all external influences. Its internal walls are studded with radio-absorbing ‘anechoic’ foam pyramids, allowing radio-frequency testing without any distorting reflections.

Its name starts with ‘Hybrid’ because the chamber can assess radio signals from antennas both in localised ‘near-field’ terms or else on a ‘far-field’ basis, as if the signal has crossed thousands of kilometres of space. A new, larger, Hertz 2.0 is currently under construction.