The goal of the RADIOBLOCKS project is to achieve a maximal boost for the European major world-leading research infrastructures in radio astronomy, which over the years have invested heavily in maintaining existing facilities as well as in substantial upgrade programmes, after identifying common challenges towards their mid- and long-term scientific visions. In this project, the institutes responsible of these facilities join forces, together with partners from industry and academia, in order to develop “common building blocks” for technological solutions beyond state-of-the-art, that will enable a broad range of new science and enhance European scientific competitiveness. They share the need to continuously improve their capabilities in order to enable new science: sensitivity, field of view, bandwidth, angular, time and frequency resolution, commensality and on-sky time, reaction time and RFI mitigation. Engagement with industry to co-develop advanced technologies will increase the partners’ technological levels and strengthen their market positions, creating a true European innovation system. This project carries out carefully targeted development work and addresses common aspects in the complete data chain, categorizing this in four phases: Novel detectors and components, digital receivers, transport and correlator, and data (post)processing. We will design and demonstrate common building blocks based on cutting-edge technologies, that will be enablers and extenders in the areas most critical to the RIs, and can and will be used for upgrades of several RIs. The building blocks will be new instrument components and advanced digital solutions based on newly available (HPC/AI optimized) hardware. This approach will enable a tremendous increase of the science delivery potential of Europe’s major radio astronomical observatories, for science cases that are high on their long-term agendas, aimed at the widest possible science community in Europe and beyond.

This proposal intends to make a ground-breaking advance in magnetometry with the development of a new portable and compact multi-sensor instrument for on ground exploration which measures the complex susceptibility with high resolution. The combination of complex susceptibility and vector measurements would provide for the first time a complete and non-invasive in situ magnetic characterization of rocks from planetary surface and subsurfaces. These topics represent a challenge since present magnetic prospectionsare principally based on measurements of magnetic field intensities and on ground surveys have never been complemented with in situ measurements of complex susceptibility. In the design of such an instrument the consortium will include two important innovative developments: on the one hand a challenging system of frequency generation and measurement (ultra precise and with accuracies better than 1:106), and on the other hand an original system for the power generation of multiple voltages based on magnetic amplifiers which apart from being intrinsically immune to radiation, are expected to improve the energy efficiency. NEWTON project will open a breach for magnetic instrumentation on board landers and rovers with the inclusion of novel instrument in short-term and mid-term future missions.