STAR-Dundee Ltd is the university’s latest exciting spin-out company. Designing communications equipment for spaceships, it is the first spin out company to literally reach for the stars!
Star’s innovative technology called SpaceWire is a new communications network which is currently being installed on NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) spaceships. A SpaceWire network connects together many of the electronic units onboard a spacecraft and can send information between them at high speeds.
Dr Steve Parkes from the space systems research group which has formed the spin out company explains: "SpaceWire is a bit like a motorway network connecting towns together. The towns are the electronic units that have to communicate with one another and the roads are the wires connecting these units to one another.
The units could be a telescope monitoring the Earth’s oceans, a large memory for storing the data gathered, computers for processing the data and controlling the spacecraft, or the radio communications sub-system that is used to receive commands from Earth and send data to ground stations. Data or control information may be passed from one unit to another. Time information is also distributed over the network." STAR-Dundee has secured SMART funding from the Scottish Executive to support the spin out.
Hardware and software products are currently being made ready for sale. The SMART award will enable STAR-Dundee Ltd to develop essential test equipment for the users of SpaceWire technology.