The activity aims to develop innovative techniques and devices for applications where extremely accurate angle measurements are required.

One application of great interest is the characterisation of accelerometers used in the ESA JUICE and Bepi Colombo space missions at an uncertainty level of 300 ppm. The goal is ambitious because the measurement range of the in-flight sensor is of the same order of magnitude as the seismic noise on the ground. The measurement is based on a comparison between the accelerometer signal tilted by a known angle and the value of the gravity acceleration multiplied by the tilt angle value.

The uncertainty required for these measurements can be obtained thanks to the instrumentation present in our laboratories at INRIM, which are at the forefront of both angle and gravity acceleration measurements.