Military/Aerospace Electronics

XCAM, the Northampton-based digital imaging specialist, is developing a variant of its Nuscis electronics for the context imager in Craft Prospect’s Salient project. In Salient, the Glasgow-based Craft Prospect will be using its on-board processing algorithms in a data processing module to perform autonomous detection and decision making for spacecraft operations. These will be based on image data provided by ...

  Concurrent Technologies has put Intel Atom x7000RE Amston Lake processors into a VME board, adding image processing and AI audio processing accelerators to the venerable form factor. CPU choice on the board, called Rhea, is either the four-core 1.5GHz x7433RE, or the two-core 2GHz x7213RE. “Whilst no longer the cutting edge of technology, VME continues to be a widely ...

The UK Government has launched the first funding call for its C-LEO programme – to help boost the country’s satellite communications sector – which was announced in the recent Spring Budget. There is £60 million of funding being made available over the next four years for satellite constellation-related ideas. Awards of up to £20 million per project will be funded ...

The use of robots should trump that of astronauts when it comes to government funded space travel, suggests Lord Rees (OM, FRS, HonFREng, FMedSci, FRAS, HonFInstP), the cosmologist and astrophysicist. The UK’s Astronomer Royal – his official title – has said government funding should no longer be used to send people into space. Talking in the context of space exploration ...

Nasa has awarded a contract to Airbus to design and build the GRACE-C twin spacecraft, in order to continue the measurement of the Earth’s gravity field. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is working with the German Space Agency, and the craft will be built at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). During its planned five year lifetime, the GRACE-C (Gravity Recovery ...

Quadsat, the Danish drone-based antenna testing company, has launched its product range with an extended breadth of frequency ranges and the addition of uplink capabilities. The Quadsat range for RF measurement comprises: QS 1-18 DL (downlink tests, covering S-KU band), QS 6-24 DL (downlink tests, X – KA low band), QS 17-31 DL (downlink, KA band), QS 6-24 DL/UL (downlink ...

Simera Sense, an optical payload specialist for small satellites, has raised €13.5 million in its first funding round. The funding will be used to further develop its camera product range, increase its production capacity, and accelerate its on-board processing capabilities, said the company. Additional production sites were also being planned in Europe. Specifically, it will fast-track the development of higher-resolution ...

Four UK technology companies – including a space situational awareness specialist – have been selected to receive support from the UK-APAC Tech Growth Programme, to help accelerate plans for expansion in Japan. Aimed at UK technology startups headquartered in the UK, the programme is a government-backed initiative run by Intralink, a business development consultancy. The latest four companies to be ...

Slingshot Aerospace, the satellite tracking specialist, has opened a UK base – Slingshot Aerospace Ltd – as part of its international expansion. Slingshot’s first offices outside its base in the USA, will be in Cornwall and London. It has existing locations in California (El Segundo) and Colorado (and Fort Collins and Colorado Springs). Melissa Quinn will step into a new ...

Abaco Systems latest analogue front-end mezzanine card for FPGAs has been tailored for software defined radio, as well as electronic warfare, radar, test and measurement. FMC300, as it will be known, has 7GHz of usable analogue bandwidth, claims the company, with multiple channels offering up to 12bit 6Gsample/s ADC and up to 16bit 12Gsample/s DAC through a JESD204B/C interface. Data ...