Dundee is most famous for jute, jam and journalism – there are bronze statues of Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx in its city centre – but the eastern Scottish city is fast gaining a global reputation as being at the cutting edge of space exploration.
In 2015, a joint European and Japanese space mission will be launched to explore the planet Mercury - the smallest and least explored planet in our solar system - and a company called Star-Dundee is set to play a major role in the venture.
The firm is an offshoot of the University of Dundee and has produced hardware called SpaceWire which will be fundamental to the success of an unmanned space probe called Bepicolombo that is due to orbit Mercury in January 2022.
Basking in temperatures of above 350C, Bepicolombo will spend a year gathering scientific information about Mercury. The European Space Agency (ESA) is leading the mission along with the Japanese Aerospace eXploration Agency (JAXA) and it is hoped Bepicolombo will add enormously to our understanding of Mercury and answer questions about the formation of the solar system.
Star-Dundee was formed as a spin-off company from the Space Technology Centre at the University of Dundee in 2002 and has grown continuously since while supporting space agencies and aerospace companies across the world with the use of SpaceWire.
Professor Steve Parkes, managing director of Star-Dundee and a director at the Space Technology Centre at the University of Dundee, said SpaceWire was hardware which acts as a spacecraft's nervous system to connect much of Bepicolombo's on-board computing technology.
SpaceWire is similar in concept to USB. With USB you can plug sensors like a webcam or a mouse (instruments) into your laptop (control processor) and you can connect a large hard drive to store data (mass memory).
If you run out of USB ports on your laptop you can attach a USB hub (routing switch) to expand the number of things you can connect to. SpaceWire is like USB but different in that it is designed specifically for spacecraft applications so that it can implemented in radiation tolerant chips. SpaceWire instruments are connected to the mass memory for storing their data and to a control processor for processing data and controlling overall operation of the instruments. If necessary SpaceWire routing switches are used to help interconnect the various units.
Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, is a hostile place – its surface is hotter than the inside of an oven during the day and colder than the coldest night in Antarctica at night. As the planet is close to the sun and without any protective atmosphere its surface is continually bombarded by radiation.
Professor Parkes said:
Bepicolombo is a difficult and dangerous mission. It is a great challenge for all the engineers involved across Europe and in Japan. In Dundee we hope that SpaceWire has helped overcome that challenge and increased the likely success of the mission. We play a small part in a great endeavour. The excitement is in the significant challenge and in working with engineers from across the world. The reward of a successful mission will be substantial scientific knowledge about Mercury and our solar system.