The specialists of Jena-Optronik have developed and manufactured opto-electronic sensors for the Attitude and Orbit Control Systems (AOCS) of satellites since the 1980's and evolved this technology to become a worldwide leader in this field. Major satellite manufacturers such as Boeing, Mitsubishi Electric, Astrium, Orbital Sciences and Alenia rely on attitude sensor products produced by Jena-Optronik.

 

The product range of Guidance, Navigation and Control sensors (GNC) covers

• Rendezvous- and Docking Sensor RVS
• Sun Sensor FSS
• Star Sensors ASTRO 10, ASTRO 15 and ASTRO APS

 

The first Star Tracker ASTRO 1 has proven its space competence on the space station MIR for more than 15 years. Today, the ASTRO 15 Star Tracker developed for very long-term missions with high accuracy pointing is successfully operating e.g. on DIRECTV's Spaceway satellites. Application examples for the company's ASTRO 10 Star Tracker are the Earth Observation programs TerraSAR and SARLupe. The next generation star sensor ASTRO APS is based on innovative CMOS detector technology and will be integrated on the European large telecom satellite AlphaSat.

More than 60 flight units of the Precision Sun Sensor PSS are operating very successfully on space missions since 1997, e.g. on several Alcatel Spacebus 3000 satellites. The successor model FSS (Fine Sun Sensor) is an analogue sun sensor with a high degree of flexibility to cope with a large variety of customer requirements and has been delivered for Radarsat-2, Cosmo-Skymed and Galileo GSTB-V2.

The unmanned Transfer Vehicles ATV (ESA) and HTV (JAXA) will approach the International Space Station ISS with the help of Jena-Optronik's Rendezvous- and Docking Sensors RVS.

Dr. Ulrich Meck
Phone: +49 3641 200-113
Fax: +49 3641 200-220
ulrich.meck@jena-optronik.de