Lunar and Interplanetary

• Current Projects
• Mission Heritage
• Sub-1metre mission
• Lunar and Interplanetary
• Galileo

SSTL is looking to the future and extending its reach from low Earth orbit missions to communications, navigation and science missions which fly beyond Earth's orbit. 

European Student Moon Orbiter (ESMO)

SSTL is managing ESA's European Student Moon Orbiter (ESMO) programme which will place a spacecraft into a lunar orbit to map the lunar surface, acquiring images and other scientific data. 

The project kicked-off in October 2009 with each spacecraft subsystem, payload and ground segment being designed, built and operated by groups of students from 19 universities based in ESA Member states and Co-operating States.  The students will learn about space science and engineering "hands on" by collaborating on the design and building of systems that could be launched into orbit around the Moon as soon as 2013. 

The next major milestone for ESMO will be the System Requirements Review in early 2010 where the system requirements and system design will be finalised, along with the confirmation of the universities for their specific development roles. 

The ESMO student teams at the kick-off meeting, held at SSTL October 2009

MoonLITE

SSTL was recently down-selected by the UK government's STFC (Science and Technology Facilities Council) to lead the design phase for the MoonLITE mission, which will lead to the development and launch of a low-cost orbiter carrying scientific lunar surface penetrators and a communications relay payload to the Moon in 2014. 

SSTL's Ultra-Lightweight computer for planetary missions - OBC695B

In October 2008 the Indian lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 was launched from the Sriharikota spaceport by the PSLV launch vehicle. The mission carries a complement of payloads including a syntheticaperture imaging radar. This payload was provided by NASA in association with the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and US Naval Air Warfare centre supported by an industrial team led by BAE Systems and including Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL). This payload, known as MiniSAR, has at its heart a computer built in the UK by SSTL. The computer is known as the SSTL OBC695 and has been developed for use in SSTL’s high performance missions as either a central on-board computer or a payload processor. The first version of the computer, the OBC695A, was developed between 2001 and 2005 and flew as a payload processor on the 1st Galileo test satellite, GIOVE-A, launched 28 December 2005. For the Chandrayan-1 mission a second version of the computer with higher radiation tolerance and lower mass and volume was developed between 2006 and 2007. This version, the OBC695B, is ideally suited to planetary missions where very high dependability requirements apply but mass and volume are at a premium due to the

tough constraints of this class of missions.

Two OBC695 flight modules with expansion boards.