Military/Aerospace Electronics

Lunar samples successfully collected by China’s Chang’e 5 robotic probe have completed their journey to Earth, according to Chinese media. The rocks and dust from the moon had been previously been delivered from Chang’e 5’s ascender to its reentry capsule. It represents the first mission since 1976 – the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 mission – to bring lunar samples down ...

NASA’s Launch Services Program (LSP) has awarded three contracts to launch small satellites (SmallSats) to space, including CubeSats, microsats or nanosatellites. The three US companies selected to provide the commercial launches are Astra Space, Relativity Space and Firefly Black LLC. And the value of their fixed-price contracts, $3.9m, $3.0m and $9.8m, respectively Miniature satellites help provide a low-cost platform for ...

Thales Alenia Space have won the contract to design the mother ship for the Comet Interceptor mission, which will see one main spacecraft and two smaller robotic probes travel to an as-yet unidentified comet, and map it in three dimensions. The smaller probes (30cm in length) will be built by the Japanese Space Agency. For the mission, once in space, ...

Asic and foundry service specialist, Redtree Solutions has signed an agreement with Agile Analog, making the latter’s configure IP available as part of the RedASIC custom chip design service. Redtree offers turnkey asic services, including offshore and local design, analogue, RF, mixed and digital design, foundry prototyping to production services, packaging and testing for both prototyping and volume production and ...

TI opens its inventory of thousands of space-grade and military-grade products to help aerospace and defense electronics companies meet growing demand. Texas Instruments is making most of its high-reliability (HiRel) semiconductor products immediately available for online purchase on TI.com, helping aerospace and defense companies quickly get the authentic TI products they need for their next-generation space-grade and military-grade designs. Engineers ...

The European Investment Bank (EIB) has awarded up to €20 million of funding to Spire Global, the US company with the world’s largest multi-purpose constellation of satellites. The financing will back capital expenditure and research and development (R&D) activities, says the EIB. Specifically, to help develop Spire’s constellation of small satellites and high-quality maritime, aviation and weather space data and ...

The UK government is investing £7 million, via the National Space Innovation Programme, in 21 UK organisations working on innovative space technologies. The idea is that it represents cash injections for “high-risk, high-reward” projects of both companies and universities. Areas addressed include monitoring climate change through Earth Observation and satellite communications to provide greater connectivity to remote places. For example, one ...

Thales Alenia Space and ESA have signed a €482 million contract, confirming the development of the ROSE-L  (Radar Observation System for Europe in L-band) environmental monitoring system. The contract was signed in the presence of Riccardo Fraccaro, Undersecretary of the Italian Prime Minister’s Office, and ESA’s Director General, Jan Wörner. Thales Alenia Space is a Joint Venture between Thales and Leonardo, ...

Renesas has announced a single-chip 14-Bit, 1-MSPS successive-approximation-register (SAR) ADC for rad-hard space applications. Renesas’ Intersil brand ISL73141SEH claims best in class dynamic and static performance, including signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), effective number of bits (ENOB), integral non-linearity (INL) and differential non-linearity (DNL). The ADC fully resets after every sample, clearing any errors that result from a single event upset (SEU) ...

UK company Metalysis is working with the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop a process to extract oxygen from lunar dust, leaving behind metal powders that could also be 3D printed into construction materials for a Moon base. The technology could prove an early step to establishing an extra-terrestrial oxygen extraction plant, hopes the agency. This would have the dual ...