Space – The Final Frontier

"STAR-Dundee spun out of the University of Dundee sixteen years ago, when it was simply myself and three of my PhD students developing electronic components for the aerospace industry in our spare time," reveals Professor Steve Parkes, Chief Technology Officer at STAR-Dundee. "Today, we’re an employee-owned company with 25 employees and offices in Dundee and Barcelona, working with the world’s space agencies and aerospace industry.

" SpaceWire is a computer network used on-board spacecraft to collect data from scientific instruments, to pass it to electronic units that process the data and store the data temporarily, and to then send it to the downlink radio system which beams the information back to Earth. The SpaceWire standard was written by the University of Dundee with inputs from international spacecraft engineers.

The University of Dundee and STARDundee are currently working on a new development – SpaceFibre, a faster, more capable version of SpaceWire, which provides high-reliability and high-availability. "SpaceFibre is just beginning to be adopted by space agencies," continued Professor Parkes. "It is already being designed into spacecraft electronic systems by several major aerospace companies. STAR-Dundee’s technology leads the way in aviation and spacecraft electronics."