Six more industries joined the Swiss Space Center

Six industries recently joined the Swiss Space Center, which includes now nineteen members. The new comers are:

Subsidiary of Clemessy Group, Clemessy Switzerland AG is a a leading swiss company acting on the aeronautics & space, scientific, transportation infrastructures and environment markets. It is specialized in: Electrical Ground Support Equipment, Monitoring and Control Systems, Test Stands, Maintenance and Operations.

Clemessy Switzerland has developed a specific EGSE competence since the early 90th, covering AIT EGSEs and Instrument EGSEs, in particular in the Power and TMTC field. This niche market core business is completed by industrial electrical facility engineering (from power distribution to Programmable Logic Controller design and development activities) and support activities.

Almatech is a fully independent and privately held SME located in Lausanne, Switzerland. The company was founded in 2009 by engineers at the benefit of 8 to 20 years of experience in the space and naval businesses. The Almatech engineering team is composed of well experienced doctors and engineers used to work for the space industry in the frame of ESA and commercial projects. This team has gained specific skills for the development, manufacture, assembly, tests and delivery of Instruments, flight structures and mechanisms.

Almatech’s business positioning is to be a reliable industrial player for the Agency and the main space industrial companies that offer services in association with high-tech laboratories through long term relationships with the Swiss academic schools / institutes. Located in the EPFL technopark, Almatech works preferably with EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) laboratories but also with other Swiss institutes and laboratories.

Almatech settled permanent mutual development partnerships with 2 Swiss SME specialized in miniaturized electronics and space composite fabrication. These partnerships allow Almatech to offer all the necessary competences for the complete design and fabrication, assembly, integration and verification of scientific Instruments, flight structures and mechanisms.

In parallel to its space related activities, Almatech is active in the naval business with the development of fluid-solid interaction code, hydrofoil design, dynamic stability optimization, mass reduction and liability maximization.

Headquartered in the UK, Meggitt PLC is an international engineering business specialising in extreme environment components and sub-systems for aerospace, defence and energy markets. The group employs c. 11,000 people across 62 operating facilities in Asia, Europe and North America and regional bases in India and the Middle East.

Its sensing systems division is a world leader in state-of-the-art sensing, monitoring and measuring in the extreme environments of aircraft, space vehicles, power generators, nuclear, oil and gas installations and test laboratories.

Its involvement in space began in 1987, when it designed monitoring systems for aircraft engines and nuclear reactors. Meggitt’s instrumentation supported the development of the Vulcain and Vulcain 2 engines of the Ariane 5 launcher and continues today with the Vinci engine qualification campaign. Our unmatched capabilities include

- Integrated vehicle health monitoring systems
- Piezo-electric accelerometers and dynamic pressure transducers (> 780o C)
- Charge converters for high-temperature piezo-electric transducers
- Cryogenic accelerometers and dynamic pressure transducers with built-in electronics
- Cryogenic, high-pressure eddy current displacement transducers, rotational speed and high resolution proximity measurement systems
- Health monitoring systems for launcher engines, helicopters and aircraft
- Custom-designed linear displacement transducers (LVDTs) and inertial measurement units (IMUs) for flight control systems and flight tests
- High-accuracy servo inclinometers for platform and telescope stabilisation and control monitoring
- High-energy and state-of-the-art low energy semi-conductor ignition systems.

Sarmap SA, currently constituted by 12 employees, was founded in January, 1998 to provide consulting services, software development and applications in the domain of remote sensing, particularly airborne and spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data processing. Training courses are also offered to extend the understanding of the utilization of SAR data, products and services.

Application areas of expertise include high resolution Digital Elevation Model production, ground deformation maps, cartography, forestry, agriculture as well as land use classification and change detection.

Spectratime (Orolia Switzerland SA) is a world leader in the generation, synchronization of precise time and frequency signals. Spectratime designs, manufactures and markets atomic clocks and network timing and synchronization solutions used in wireline and wireless telecom networks, as well as in space and defense systems.
Spectratime has undisputed worldwide leadership positions in both timing and synchronization and is the number one worldwide provider of:
1. Space-qualified Passive Hydrogen maser clocks (PHM) and Rubidium Atomic Frequency Standard (RAFS)
2. High-performance synchronization modules & solutions (as per Galileo PTF)

In addition, Spectratime & T4S are the second largest international suppliers of:
1. Rubidium clocks and GPS based synchronized Rb oscillators for Ground & space
2. Active Hydrogen Masers

It benefits from a key n°3 worldwide position in the rubidium clocks market for commercial applications. 50% of Spectratime sales are in Europe mainly for Galileo program and various customers in Europe, the remaining 50% are in the US and Asia. Spectratime’ s strategy today is to strengthen its position as the market leader in Asia and Europe for timing and synchronization solutions.

Spectratime has 4 distinct lines of timing products:
1. The iSource+ line grouping all frequency generation sources: highly accurate, highly stable clocks such as the Rubidium for various applications in Military, Telecom and Navigation.
2. The iSync+ line containing synchronization modules for telecommunication applications.
3. The iRef+ line for clocks used as a time reference.
4. The iTest+ line for ultra high precision clocks for test and measurement applications.

The figure below shows Spectratime products and corresponding applications:

Space qualified clocks ranging in complexity from the crystal oscillator to the passive Hydrogen maser. These clocks can be characterized by 2 main parameters:
1. The level of precision at which they can “measure” the time.
2. Their stability over time. For instance, the crystal oscillator although shielded against

The external environment which may affect its precision, may degrade or loose some of its precision over time. This phenomenon is known as the drift. The crystal oscillator stability for instance is 3e-12/10s, the Rubidium clock stability is 1e-12/10s and the passive H maser stability is 2e-13/10s

Sercalo Microtechnolgy was founded in 1999. The company has the ambition of producing high quality and top performance MOEMS (Micro-Opto- Electro-Mechanical Systems) components. The management and Engineering team counts with more than 20 years of experience and expertise in the MEMS and fiber optical components area. Their skills span all the process of manufacture: MEMS chip design, fabrication and marketing.
Sercalo has a wide variety of products in the market: a diversity of fiber optical MEM switches for single mode, multi mode as well as specialty fibers for visible and polarisation maintaing fibers. MEMS based variable optical attenators and MEMS TUNABLE OPTICAL FILTERS are new fiber optic components.
Sercalo produces also more general MEMS components such as 3D MEMS Micro-mirrors and miniature LASER BEAM SCANNERS.
Finally Sercalo builds custom fiber optical systems integrating its own components with other optical functions and "plug and play" interfaces for meeting customer defined testing needs.
Sercalo products are leading the market of fiber optical components because of their:
• reliability
• wide wavelength range covering the full range of the used fibers
• solid state like repeatability
• no wear out