Contract To Manufacture Ka-band Extended Interaction Klystrons For The SWOT Satellite

The Communications & Medical Products Division of Communications & Power Industries (CPI) has been awarded a $3.8 million Canadian, or approximately $2.8 million U.S., contract by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to manufacture the flight hardware of the Ka-band Extended Interaction Klystron (EIK) for the Surface Water & Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission.  SWOT, scheduled to launch in April 2021, is a joint mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the French Space Agency (CNES), with a contribution from the CSA.  The SWOT mission will survey 90 percent of Earth's surface and collect precise altimetric measurements of rivers, lakes, reservoirs and flooded zones, as well as the sea-surface height (SSH) of all oceans.

Under the contract, CPI will develop two flight models and one spare flight model 35 gigahertz Extended Interaction Klystrons; the company had previously provided development models of the EIK for this program in 2014.  CPI's EIKs are a critical component of the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) instrument, creating the high-power microwaves required for the instrument to measure the fine details of the oceans' surface topography and how bodies of water change over time.  SWOT is expected to measure ocean features with resolution that is 10 times better than that of current technologies.  This information is expected to be of great utility to Environment Canada for hydrological and meteorological monitoring and forecasting and to Fisheries and Oceans Canada for ocean science and forecasting.

Work on this project will take place at CPI's facilities in Georgetown, Ontario, Canada.  CPI will deliver flight models beginning in 2018.

In awarding the EIK contract, the CSA stated that "CPI is world-renowned for its expertise in building this sophisticated device" and is "the only company in the world with a proven record in building and flying" EIKs in space.  Moreover, CPI's EIKs are the technology of choice for meteorological satellite missions.  CPI's EIK technology was also recently chosen to support the space-based radar system on the Meteorological Operational Satellite – Second Generation (MetOp-SG) program, a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), consisting of two series of satellites carrying complementary instruments.  Previous projects include the EarthCARE joint mission between European and Japanese space agencies, as well as NASA's CloudSat Earth Observation satellite.  CPI received funding from CSA for its work on the CloudSat program.