On July 1st 2020 ESA approved the procurement of the 6 upcoming “High priority candidate missions (HPCM)” of the ESA Copernicus program. Within their HPCM proposal Airbus selected STI to develop and build the Instrument Control Unit (ICU) for the Radar Observing System for Europe mission ROSE-L as well as the Coarse Earth Sun Sensor (CESS) for Copernicus Polar Ice and Snow Topography Altimeter mission CRISTAL.
STI electronics for space
The ICU development will be SpaceTech’s first “stand-alone” electronics unit to fly on an ESA mission and is an important milestone for STI electronics equipment. STI electronics are already regularly included in our various payload activities.
It also marks the second use of the advanced CESS, providing significantly improved performance over the original CESS, which is in orbit on more than 15 missions.
