SEA (Group) Ltd, based in Beckington and Fishponds, Bristol beat competition from the UK and abroad, following a European tendering process for the contract which entails designing and building the 4K Cooler Drive Electronics (4KCDE) - a critical part of the High Frequency Instrument (HFI) on the Planck spacecraft.

SEA's Project Manager, Dr Nigel Wright said: "This is an important contract for SEA to have won. The 4KCDE represents the first space flight hardware which will be designed and built by the company. The 4KCDE programme is expected to last approximately 2 years leading up to the delivery of the Flight Model which is due in May 2003. This project will allow SEA to exploit its specific expertise on processor systems including the onboard software as well as the new clean room facilities now available at Beckington."

PPARC is committed to working with small businesses and this is the first PPARC contract to be awarded meeting the objectives for the Government's Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI).

Commenting on this Fiona Anderson, Industry Programmes Manager for PPARC said:

"It is very encouraging that a medium sized UK business has been successful in winning a large research and development contract such as this, particularly after competing at a European level. Industry plays an important role in the development of new technologies required to deliver the PPARC science programme, often undertaken in collaboration with PPARC-supported academics. PPARC will continue to make similar technology development opportunities within its programme open to small and medium sized enterprises."

The Planck mission, due to be launched on an Ariane-5 launcher in 2007, has been designed to help answer key questions for humankind: how did the universe come to be and how will it evolve? It seeks to achieve this by measuring accurately the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB), or "first light" following the Big Bang.

Planck will carry a 1.5 metre telescope which will focus radiation from the sky onto two arrays of highly sensitive radio detectors, the Low Frequency Instrument and the High Frequency Instrument. The HFI will look for fast variations in the background temperature of deep space. The temperature of the detectors used in the instrument needs to be extremely cold (approximately 0.1 degrees Celsius above absolute zero). The 4KCDE is used to control and drive mechanical coolers which cool these detectors down to a temperature of 4 Kelvin.

The temperature variations will provide scientists with a gold mine of information. They are nothing less than the imprints left in the past by matter. At that time matter already hosted the 'seeds' out of which huge structures like galaxies and galaxy clusters were formed. The tiny variations in the measured temperature of the CMB are the 'fingerprints' left by those 'clots' of matter.

The 4KCDE is one of several UK contributions to the Planck scientific payload funded by PPARC. The Planck 4K cooling system also involves the Cryogenic Systems Group and Space Instrumentation Group from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) is the UK's strategic science investment agency. It funds research, education and public understanding in four broad areas of science - particle physics, astronomy, cosmology and space science.

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