Planck LFI flight model feed horns

TL;DR

This paper details the design, manufacturing, and testing of the flight model feed horns for the Planck Low Frequency Instrument, ensuring optimal optical interfacing within strict mechanical constraints.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive account of the development and successful testing of the flight model feed horns for the Planck LFI.

Findings

All eleven feed horns were successfully tested.

The feed horns meet the optical and mechanical requirements.

They were integrated with the Radiometer Chain Assembly.

Abstract

this paper is part of the Prelaunch status LFI papers published on JINST: http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/-page=extra.proc5/jinst The Low Frequency Instrument is optically interfaced with the ESA Planck telescope through 11 corrugated feed horns each connected to the Radiometer Chain Assembly (RCA). This paper describes the design, the manufacturing and the testing of the flight model feed horns. They have been designed to optimize the LFI optical interfaces taking into account the tight mechanical requirements imposed by the Planck focal plane layout. All the eleven units have been successfully tested and integrated with the Ortho Mode transducers.