Space. The final frontier. But not for Dundee University. Their world leading research on spacecraft technology has been going on in the school of computing for over a decade.
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The Space Technology Centre at Dundee works with everybody from the European Space Agency to NASA, as well as the Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency and many more in between.
Dozens of satellites and spacecraft are launched each year and sent into space. Usually these spacecraft and satellites are not manned and have to handle masses of data – storing it, processing it, moving it around. It used to be that each space organisation had their own, often inefficient way of doing this, until the University of Dundee’s team invented SpaceWire.
SpaceWire is way of connecting high-speed links and networks on spacecraft, connecting instruments, mass-memory and other on-board systems – just think of it in the same way your usb cable connects your phone to your computer.
SpaceWire has already been used in deployed in missions by the world’s leading space programs. It was used in mission to form a 3D model of the stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. It is used onboard Europe’s Sentinel series of Earth Observation spacecraft, providing environmental scientists with crucial information about our planet. It will be integrated into the ESA’s Euclid space telescope, which will map the distribution of dark matter in the Universe.
SpaceWire will also be key in the joint European and Japanese space mission which will explore the planet Mercury – the smallest and least explored planet in our solar system – via an unmanned space probe called Bepicolombo that is due to orbit Mercury in January 2022.
