The NewSpace revolution has brought with it the development of new technologies in the space industry, including the digitalisation of the main subsystems that make up a satellite with the aim of increasing performance, improving interoperability and reducing costs. In this new paradigm, attitude control systems, responsible for correctly positioning and orienting satellites in orbit, play a fundamental role given the demanding requirements of the new satellite constellations dedicated to offering telecommunications and earth observation services. The future seeks to ensure that satellites in these constellations can communicate and position themselves correctly with each other without depending exclusively on control carried out from the ground segment.
DIGISOLAR aims to advance in an unprecedented complete digitalisation of the solar sensor, providing a novel asynchronous data reading technique with an event-based sensor architecture. The objective is to improve the current technology of solar sensors based on photodiodes and analogue interface, considerably reducing energy consumption, simplifying the communications interface by making it digital, achieving total immunity to albedo and improving precision, while maintaining high robustness against radiation.
DIGISOLAR is therefore part of an industrial research activity, and applies for the first time to the space segment new technologies related to digitalisation and Industry 4.0. It is important to highlight that a high-performance, albedo-immune digital solar sensor has been one of ESA’s technological objectives for approximately three decades, and that after a review of the state of the art of the technology, no research has been carried out to date using the sensor architecture proposed in this project.
In this second phase, the consortium participating in DIGISOLAR F2, which has a total budget of €371,847.37, will be involved in the development of a new solar sensor. , is led by an AEI (Andalucía Aerospace Cluster) and formed by a public research organisation (University of Seville - Seville Microelectronics Institute), a large company (Alter Technology), two technology-based SMEs (Solar MEMS Technologies and Simetrycal), a technology-based start-up (FOSSA Systems) and a non-profit cluster association (SECPHO).
