TECHNOLOGY

SMALLER COMPENENTS, LOWER COSTS, HIGHER PAYLOAD

OUR CUBESATS

Due to the miniaturization of technology in the last few years, it is now possible to put a camera, an image processing unit, and the necessary support electronics into a 3-unit CubeSat with the size of 30x10x10 cm³. The so-called New Space movement enables the launch of standardized nanosatellites. They are built with commonly available off-the-shelf components, and are relatively cheap compared to old large satellites, allowing the establishment of larger constellations.

EACH HOTSPOT DETECTED IN REAL-TIME

CONSTELLATION OF NANOSATELLITES

Our wildfire service receives data from a variety of existing satellites. By developing our own CubeSat constellation we will be able to speed up detection times significantly. The first step is the launch of several complementary satellites. Even the first few will increase the number of revisits, creating greater coverage of the earth’s surface and detecting wildfires earlier. The long-term constellation specifications are:

SATELLITE FRAMEWORK

Our patented CubeSat architecture leads to a 40% higher payload volume compared to traditional CubeSat systems. It allows to integrate parts of the satellite bus into multiple, redundant side-panels and therefore enables high scalability and reliability of our satellite.

INFRARED CAMERA

Our patent-pending multispectral thermal infrared imager module is optimized for the volumetric constraints of CubeSats. It can sense mid-wave as well as long-wave infrared radiation, which makes it the ideal choice for detecting high-temperature events – wildfires.

ON-ORBIT PROCESSING

Our cutting edge GPU accelerated onboard processing module significantly reduces the downlink latency and bandwidth. Wildfires can already be detected onboard the satellite and are distributed with the help of relay communication, cutting down the delay of wildfire alert dissemination by several hours.

RELAY COMMUNICATION

After the wildfire alerts are generated by the processing module, the information is sent down via a real-time communication link. The use of Globalstar simplex transmitters allows the alerts to be sent to our ground segment within seconds from anywhere in orbit.

ELECTRONICS, OPTICS AND MECHANICAL R&D

OUR ENGINEERING CAPABILITIES

We are not only building our own CubeSats. We also offer our experience to customers in other disciplines:

As partner of Globalstar Inc. we develop and manufacture custom satellite communication modules (as we showed within the Track & Trust project).

Our optical imaging department offers support for MWIR and TIR design applications, high-precision thermal management solutions and IRFPA raw data post processing know-how.

Many members of our team were involved in the MOVE-II CubeSat, which is operational in orbit since Dec 2018. We have know-how in software and hardware development for high-reliability applications (as shown in the EMPS project).

As member of the NVIDIA Inception program we offer high-performance & low-power computing solutions, based on the NVIDIA Jetson module and custom carrier boards.

We have an FPGA development environmet for System-on-Chip applications, with focus on camera readout, storage and PCIe high-speed data transfer to a processing module.

Our lab is fully equipped with an electronics soldering/rework station, SMD production line, rapid prototyping capabilities, an optics test bench with calibration sources specialized for IR experiments and a fully autonomous test environment (24/7 automated surveillance and data collection into the cloud, cloud based online visualization of parameters).

GENA-SAT, ESA TRACK &TRUST, EMPS, MOVE-II

PROJECTS AND COLLABORATIONS

In phase 1 of GENA-Sat we carry out a de-risk activity for a Generic Flexible Nanosat Platform for IOD and IOV Services. This work is carried out a program of, and funded by, the European Space Agency. We were recently awarded this contract from ESA and will carry out the work together with TUM and HPS for the next 6 months.

Together with the UK based Weaver Labs, we supported the blockchain company Datarella in the ESA kickstart activity Track & Trust: Space Linked Tracking project. We built a hardware platform for communication with the Globalstar satellite network, developed the corresponding firmware and concluded with a successful joint demonstration of a blockchain transaction via a satellite network. This will increase the trust for humanitarian aid and tracking services.

Thomas, Florian, and Rupert, as well as many of our employees and working students, gained their practical experience in spacecraft design at the LRT by launching CubeSats and high-altitude balloons. MOVE-II is a university satellite project based at the Chair of Astronautics (LRT) at the TUM. With more than 130 students they developed a 1-Unit CubeSat, which was launched with SpaceX in December 2018.

In 2018, the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia offered to test-fly a power supply on their M2-satellite as an additional payload. So the Extendable Modular Power Supply (EMPS) project was created, based on a cooperation between the LRT, the UNSW and OroraTech. Its purpose is to further develop the power supply, which is spread over several redundant boards within the satellite. Two of those power supply modules were launched in late 2019 into orbit.

TECHNOLOGY

SMALLER COMPENENTS, LOWER COSTS, HIGHER PAYLOAD

OUR CUBESATS

EACH HOTSPOT DETECTED IN REAL-TIME