About the author

Simone Del Togno

Simone Del Togno is a thermal and radiation engineer in the Planetary Sensor Systems department at the DLR Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin. His main task is to ensure that the scientific instruments developed here survive and function correctly in space. He contributes to the design and testing of the instrument prototypes.

Simone has worked on several instruments: the BepiColombo Laser Altimeter (BELA) on the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission to Mercury, the JANUS camera and the Ganymede Laser Altimeter (GALA) on the ESA JUICE mission to Jupiter, the fast electronics of the PLATO space telescope, and the infrared spectroscopes VenSpec-M, for the ESA EnVision mission, and VEM, for the NASA/JPL VERITAS mission, both destined for Venus.

 

Posts from Simone Del Togno

Space | 27. March 2023

GALA on JUICE Part 3 – The challenge of radiation exposure on the 'Mount Everest of the Solar System'

The Ganymede Laser Altimeter (GALA) will face one of the most hostile environments in the Solar System while in the Jupiter system. The space around the planet is saturated with an enormously high level of radiation, so strong that it can degrade the performance of orbiting scientific instruments or even destroy them. GALA is one of ten instruments on board the JUICE mission, which will set off for the fifth planet of the Solar System in April 2023. It was meticulously developed and extensively tested to survive and function correctly in this extreme environment. read more