The goals of the Hardware Group is to provide technical support to the four Divisions of the IAA and the development of scientific technology.

Highly competent laboratory technicians and development engineers, many of them with decades of hands-on space and astronomy hardware experience, perform much of the experimental and development work such as characterization of detectors and sensors as it is needed to advance the state of the art of these devices or design, assembly and testing of the astronomy or the scientific flight hardware.

In the development of scientific technology the main research topics are:

• On-board scientific payloads for stratospheric rockets and space instruments development for scientific interplanetary satellites
• Astrophysics instrumentation specially design for the Sierra Nevada Observatory.

Although the scientific data interpretation is often the most productive in terms of published results, and does not require a specialized infrastructure, because data carriers and computing equipment will usually do; nevertheless it is rarely done by people of this group. Anyway it is crucial for UDIT engineers to pursuit the mentioned research activities, since they provide to scientist with the sense of reality and judgement he needs to properly fulfil his line functions of study and projects responsible.

The UDIT engineers are currently working in the following project:

• The IMaX experiment (Imaging Magnetograph eXperiment) is an experimental solar magnetograph that will provide vector magnetograms of the solar surface with a spatial resolution of 70 km. The magnetograph is one of the postfocal instruments of the Sunrise mission, a stratospheric balloon to be flown from Antarctica within the NASA Long Duration Balloon. The IMaX consortium is formed by several Spanish institutes: the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA), the Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aerospacial and the Grupo de Astronomía y Ciencias del Espacio (GACE) from Valencia University.

The UDIT engineers have been involved in the following project:

The Rosetta mission

• The aim of the international ROSETTA mission is a study of the origin and evolution of primitive bodies of the solar system and to derive a cosmological history for the solar system in general. To achieve this aim the spacecraft will make fly-by observations of two objects in the asteroid belt, orbital observations of the comet Wirtanen and carry a probe for in situ measurements of the comet surface. Among the instruments carried on the spacecraft are OSIRIS and GIADA, to both of which, Spain is a major contributor.

OSIRIS (Optical Spectroscopic and Infrared Remote Imaging System)

GIADA (Grain Impact Analyzer and Dust Accumulator)