【97】The Golden Neural Network of Satellites: Writing Chinese Precision in Space

【97】The Golden Neural Network of Satellites: Writing Chinese Precision in Space

At the moment when the news came from the Jiuquan Launch Site, the entire workshop was so quiet that one could hear one's own heartbeat. The 37 sets of gold coils we developed for the Fengyun-4 meteorological satellite had all been working normally in orbit for a full year - the data transmission showed that in the extreme temperature range of ±150 degrees Celsius in space, the inductance temperature drift coefficient was controlled at 0.3 ppm/℃, setting a new record for components of Chinese spacecraft. The veteran experts at the assembly plant specially called to say: "Do you know? For similar satellites from Europe and the United States, this indicator is usually 2-3 ppm."

Time went back five years ago when we first came into contact with the space project. The skeptical voices of the expert team from the other side flooded in like a tide: "Private enterprises making aerospace-grade coils?" "Gold will become brittle under the radiation in space" "Do you have the ten-year lifespan data in a vacuum environment?" The most stressful thing was that this task had no way out - the satellite had entered the assembly stage, and the coils from the original supplier failed collectively in the hot vacuum test, leaving us only one-third of the normal cycle time.

Why must space use gold? Three cruel cosmic laws gave the answer: First, the atomic oxygen environment in space would cause the surfaces of silver and copper to flake, and gold is the only material that can completely resist it; Second, when the satellite enters and exits the Earth's shadow zone, the temperature difference can reach 300 degrees, and the thermal expansion coefficient of gold is the most stable among all metals; Third, the galactic cosmic rays would cause lattice defects in the material, and the defect recovery rate of gold is two orders of magnitude faster than other metals. But the theory is beautiful, but the practice is difficult: We had to etch micro-micron spiral grooves on the 0.02-millimeter-diameter gold lines to optimize the high-frequency characteristics, which is equivalent to carving the Great Wall on a hair strand.

The breakthrough occurred on the 79th test. Our independently developed ion beam etching machine suddenly displayed a perfect spiral pattern on the monitoring screen, and the entire laboratory boiled over. But the joy only lasted for three hours - then the thermal shock test revealed that the sample had micro cracks. That night, process engineer Old Wang didn't go home. He compared the crack morphology under the electron microscope one by one and finally found that the temperature gradient in the annealing process was 0.5 degrees Celsius higher. After re-adjusting, the third batch of samples passed all aerospace-grade tests perfectly.

Now, twenty-three Chinese satellites are using our gold coils to build their "neural networks". What makes us most proud is the "Wukong" dark matter detection satellite, whose electromagnetic energy detector requires 256 sets of ultra-precise inductors. Our gold coils have enabled the energy resolution to reach the international leading level. The project scientific advisor said at the acceptance meeting: "These gold coils, each is an eye for detecting dark matter." And I know that for these 256 pairs of "eyes", our team had eight people not taking a year off for the holidays for three years, and the test room had burned up four imported equipment worth 10 million yuan.

This story began with doubts, and ended in space. When "Fengyun-4" transmitted global meteorological data every day, and when "Wukong" captured suspected traces of dark matter, those golden coils working silently in the vacuum environment were proving one thing: Chinese private manufacturing can not only meet aerospace standards, but also define aerospace standards. The gold melted into the coils eventually turned into the brightest star of Chinese aerospace.

Let Chinese satellites have golden reliability - Golden Eagle aerospace gold coils escort every space journey.