We are once again recruitiing to expand our team in Dundee and are looking for Electronic Engineers, a PCB Designer and a Mechanical Engineer. If you’d like to work in the space industry, for a company that values its employees, based in Scotland’s first UNESCO City of Design, then please send us your CV.
Further details on each role are available at the links below:
Since 2012, STAR-Dundee’s team in Dundee have been based in STAR House, a 19th century building in the centre of Dundee. In 2018, the building celebrates its 200th anniversary, having been built in 1818 for James Gray, a merchant and magistrate of Dundee.
We are very grateful to Vivienne Dunstan, the wife of one of our colleagues, who has put together a “History of 166 Nethergate, Dundee, and its inhabitants from 1818 until 2018”. Viv has gone to great lengths to find out about each of the occupants of the building and the changes that have been made to the building over its lifetime.
STAR-Dundee bought the building in 2011 from the University of Dundee and we spent a year renovating it before moving in in the summer of 2012. As well as ensuring it was fit for our needs as a company developing spacecraft technology, we also tried to ensure the building retained its original character. This meant restoring many features which had been covered up or removed, and we now have beautiful wooden floors which were previously covered, while all the windows in the building have been restored to their original Georgian style.
Thanks to Viv’s work, we can now compare the building in its current state to the original plans and the old photos that she has unearthed.
We are very proud of our roots in Dundee and our home in STAR House. Due to its unique character, photos of the building appear in many of our tweets, and it provides a welcoming environment for both employees and visitors alike.
Happy Birthday STAR House!
On 20th October 2018, at 01:45 UT, the BepiColombo mission to Mercury launched from Kourou, French Guiana. BepiColombo consists of two main spacecraft, both of which make extensive use of SpaceWire for onboard data handling, plus a propulsion module using an ion thruster for the seven year voyage to Mercury orbit.
This joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will be the third mission to explore Mercury, following on from NASA’s Mariner 10 (1973) and Messenger (2004). The European module, the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO), and the Japanese module, the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO), will spend at least one year studying Mercury, one of the most mysterious and little understood planets in our Solar System.
It’s hoped that the observations of the planet’s surface and internal structure, and of its unusually strong magnetic field, will help improve theories of the origin and evolution of our Solar System, and also of the likely nature of planetary systems around other stars.
All of us at STAR-Dundee would like to congratulate the BepiColombo team on the successful development and launch of the mission, and we are grateful for the small part we were able to play in this.
Over several years, STAR-Dundee has developed a range of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) based wideband spectrometers (WBS). The latest of these, WBS V, is a prototype flight board designed in a radiation tolerant FPGA, the Microsemi RTG4. Implemented in the RTG4 is a 1024-point FFT based spectrometer offering processing power in the region of 100 GOPS, enabling operation at 2.4 Gsamples/s.
On Wednesday the 5th of September 2018, STAR-Dundee will be delivering a presentation and poster at the UK National Earth Observation Conference in Birmingham, describing some of the technical details of the WBS V and the unique scientific research that it is being used to perform. The presentation is being held in Room G3 at 10:24, while the poster will be presented from 17:00 to 19:00 in the Great Hall.
STAR-Dundee is a partner in Hi-FLY, a research project funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme. The aim of Hi-FLY is to develop and validate innovative technologies to remarkably improve space on-board data handling and transfer capabilities, primarily for Earth Observation and partly also for Telecom future missions. To achieve this goal, Hi-FLY will make substantial advances in all major elements of the data chain including inter-satellite and on-board networks, payload processing, data compression, protection, storage and transmission.
STAR-Dundee’s role includes providing a standard interface, SpaceFibre, to the instruments and elements of the payload data chain. This is scalable to sustain data-rates from 1 Gbit/s to 40 Gbit/s per link and supports very high-speed data transfer and equipment control, configuration and monitoring through the same interface, enhancing overall system reliability. The end to end data chain will support an input data-rate from instruments of 50 Gbit/s and an output data-rate to the downlink of 10 Gbit/s.
The Hi-FLY project partners are:
Further information on the Hi-FLY project can be found on the Hi-FLY project website, while a video providing an overview of the project is available on the Hi-FLY YouTube channel.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 776151
STAR-Dundee are delighted to announce that we have been shortlisted in two categories for the Courier Business Awards 2018. We are finalists in the Export and Science and Technology categories, with the winners to be announced at the Awards event on the 27th of October, at which we will have a table. The full list of finalists can be found in the Courier’s story on the announcement.
The Courier Business Awards recognise the many great achievements of businesses in Tayside and Fife. The first awards were held in 2013 and this is the third year that we have entered after being named Design and Innovation Business of the Year last year.
We are always proud to be recognised in this manner by the judges, who themselves are local business people, and look forward to joining the other businesses at the Awards Evening.
From the 6th to the 9th of August, STAR-Dundee will be exhibiting at the 32nd Annual Small Satellite Conference in Logan, Utah, USA. If you’re attending the event, come and visit us at Booth 31 in the main hall (Taggart Student Center).
We’ll be demonstrating some of our forthcoming products, including the Link Analyser Mk3, STAR Fire Mk3 and SpaceWire Gigabit Ethernet (GbE Brick). Also on our stand will be our SpaceFibre Camera, which will be transferring video across SpaceFibre at Gbit/s rates to the STAR Fire Mk3, where it will be displayed on the connected PC using our STAR-System software suite.
STAR-Dundee attended the Space Computing & Connected Enterprise Resiliency Conference for the first time, in Bedford, Massachusetts from June 4th – June 8th 2018.
STAR-Dundee took part in Session 5 (1:00PM – 3:30PM, DoubleTree): ‘Interconnects for Space – including SpaceVPX, SpaceWire, SpaceFibre, sRIO, TTE, standards/markets, and emerging standards.’
Dave Gibson, a Software Engineer at STAR-Dundee, gave a presentation covering the main features and benefits of SpaceFibre. Find out more about SpaceFibre here: https://www.star-dundee.com/knowledge-base/what-is-spacefibre.
Our last conference in May is Data Systems in Aerospace (DASIA) from the 29th-31st of May in Oxford, UK.
On May 29th, our CTO, Steve Parkes, will be presenting ‘A Wideband Spectrometer in the Microsemi RTG4 FPGA‘ at 16:00 in Room B and then ‘SpaceFibre Image Sensor and Data Processing Units’ at 16:30 in Room A.
On May the 30th, Steve will present a paper on PANGU ‘PANGU V4: A Software tool for testing vision-based guidence and navigation systems for in-orbit, entry descent and landing and surface mobility operations’ at 9:00 in Room A.
STAR-Dundee will also have a table in the exhibition hall where we will have a demonstration of PANGU.
See the full programme at the Data Systems in Aerospace (DASIA) website.
STAR-Dundee will be exhibiting at the Single Event Effects (SEE) Symposium & Military and Aerospace Programmable Logic Devices (MAPLD) Workshop in San Diego on 21-24 May.
Visit our Stand to see the first demos of our new products Link Analyser Mk3, STAR Fire Mk3 and SpaceWire Gigabit Ethernet (GbE Brick) which will soon be relased for sale.
Our CTO, Steve Parkes, will also present on the topic ‘A High Availability, High Reliability SpaceVPX System’ on Wednesday 23rd of May. See the full programme on the Single Event Effects (SEE) Symposium & Military and Aerospace Programmable Logic Devices (MAPLD) website.
Featured Image: Our new products: Link Analyser Mk3, STAR Fire Mk3 and SpaceWire Gigabit Ethernet (GbE Brick).
May is a busy month for all at STAR-Dundee. We will be at 3 events: SpaceWire Conference, SEE/MAPLD and DASIA.
From 14-18 May we will be at the SpaceWire Conference in Los Angeles.
On Monday the 14th Steve Parkes, our CTO and author of the SpaceFibre standard with inputs from several spacecraft engineers, will be presenting a SpaceFibre tutorial, explaining how the protocol operates and how it can be used to solve many communications problems on-board spacecraft. This tutorial is free for everyone registered for the SpaceWire Conference. More information can be found on the SpaceWire Conference website programme page.
STAR-Dundee’s CEO, Stuart Mills, will Chair the ‘Missions & Applications’ session from 11:30-12:35 on Tuesday the 15th and STAR-Barcelona Director and R&D Engineer Albert Ferrer Florit will chair the ‘Networks & Protocols’ session from 13:30-15:00 on Wednesday the 16th.
Employees from STAR-Dundee have contributed to a number of papers which will be presented at the conference. The titles, authors and times are below:
Tuesday the 15th:
Thursday 17th:
Visit the SpaceWire Conference website for the full programme.
STAR-Dundee will also be exhibiting at the conference. Visit our stand to be one of the first to see demos showcasing three new products: the Link Analyser Mk3, STAR Fire Mk3 and SpaceWire Gigabit Ethernet (GbE Brick) which will soon be relased for sale.
Registration for the SpaceWire conference is open until the 14th of May – register here: http://2018.spacewire-conference.org/registration/
Featured Image: Electronics Engineer Pete Scott ready to demo at the SpaceWire Conference 2018.
Interested in Space Technology?
Graduated from an Electronic Engineering degree or similar course?
Then the Optical Communication and Image Processing for Space Applications (OCIPSA) engineering funded studentship with STAR-Dundee, The University of Dundee, Heriot-Watt University and EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Applied Photonics is for you!
The OCIPSA project will research and develop optical communication technology and image processing technology for space applications. It will explore the use of fibre optics in high-availability SpaceFibre networks, considering lane and link redundancy to provide the high reliability and high availability capabilities required on-board a spacecraft. Experimentation is expected to include the design (in VHDL for FPGAs) of digital communication protocol engines driving fibre optics, the construction of fault tolerant networks, the integration of an image sensor and image processing application, and the overall evaluation of the performance of the fibre optic network in the event of transient, persistent and permanent lane and link failures.
Find out more here: https://www.cdtphotonics.hw.ac.uk/vacancy/2017/optical-communication-and-image-processing-space-applications-ocipsa
Find out how to apply here: https://www.cdtphotonics.hw.ac.uk/apply.html
The featured image shows the Crab Nebula in bright neon colours. The unusual image was produced by combining data from telescopes spanning nearly the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to X-rays. Find out more here: http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages Copyright: NASA, ESA, G. Dubner (IAFE, CONICET-University of Buenos Aires) et al.; A. Loll et al.; T. Temim et al.; F. Seward et al.; VLA/NRAO/AUI/NSF; Chandra/CXC; Spitzer/JPL-Caltech; XMM-Newton/ESA; and Hubble/STScI, CC BY 4.0