Post by Sandia National Laboratories

Sandia’s Saturn accelerator gets a refresh 🫧 After nearly 40 years and 4,726 high-voltage shots, Sandia’s powerful X-ray generator has been updated for reliability and performance. From above, Saturn looks like a giant wagon wheel with 36 spokes leading to a 6-foot center hub. It produces hard X-rays used to test and qualify national security electronics, subsystems and materials against X-ray radiation. “A lot of things have to go right for a really good shot on any big machine,” Sandia electrical engineer Mark Savage said. “It doesn’t take many things going wrong to affect it seriously.” To keep Saturn synchronized, when a billionth of a second matters, the team replaced gas switches, the vacuum insulator stack and transmission lines. Read more about Saturn’s refresh: https://bit.ly/3QJFve9