VECTRONIC Aerospace GmbH

VECTRONIC Aerospace GmbH is a German technology company founded in 2000 and headquartered in Berlin, Germany. The company combines over two decades of research and development expertise across two sectors: satellite/spacecraft components and wildlife GPS monitoring. In the space domain, VECTRONIC manufactures flight-proven reaction wheels, star trackers, power control and distribution units, on-board data handling systems, and payload data handling systems for small and medium satellites. VECTRONIC's space hardware has flown on approximately 810 active missions. In parallel, the company is a globally recognized leader in wildlife telemetry, with around 68,000 GPS collars deployed in 76 countries for wildlife research projects.

VECTRONIC's VRW-series reaction wheels provide angular momentum options from 0.2 Nms up to 8 Nms with customizable rotor geometry and mass, built around a brushless DC motor, a PI-loop speed controller running on a 32-bit microprocessor, and a low-noise four-quadrant PWM drive. The wheels support both torque and speed control modes over RS422, RS485 or CAN interfaces, feature radiation tolerance above 20 krad, and are rated for a nominal in-orbit lifetime exceeding 45,000 hours.

The VST-series star trackers (VST-41M and VST-68M) use Leica lens systems and rad-hard CMOS imagers to deliver autonomous attitude determination relative to the J2000 celestial reference frame, suitable for LEO, GEO and interplanetary missions. VECTRONIC also produces the VPCDU power control and distribution unit, an on-board data handling (OBDH) system, and the VPDHS payload data handling system for compressing and formatting high-rate camera/payload data streams.