University of Dundee Space Systems Research Group
Space Systems Research Group is in the Department of Applied Computing at the University of Dundee, a traditional Scottish University which pursues excellence in both research and education.
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The Department of Applied Computing was rated 5A (excellent) in the UK Government Research Assessment of Universities, a reflection of the outstanding expertise and high international reputation of the department. The University of Dundee is a large and diverse organisation with over a thousand academic and research staff at its site in the centre of Dundee.
The Applied Computing department occupies two adjacent buildings on the University campus. The department has extensive computing resources contained within three computing laboratories. There is a total of around 100 PCs that run under both Windows NT and Linux, There are also several SUN workstations running the Solaris operating system. The Applied Computing laboratories contain a range of other equipment including scanners, cameras and printers. The computing facilities are linked by a departmental network that is connected via a bridge to the University network and to the Internet. In addition to these computing resources the University has several other computing laboratories for general use and a centralised Unix system available within the University's IT Services.
Dundee is recognised as one of the foremost European academic institutions for research and development of electronic processing systems for satellites. The Space Systems Research Group at Dundee has extensive experience of satellite on-board processing and data-handling systems, planetary surface simulation and satellite data reception. The Space Systems Research Group is led by Dr Steve Parkes who has a long track record of satellite electronic research and development in both academia and the space industry.
Current research activities of the group include:- - SpaceWire - High-speed, data-handling infrastructure for future European satellites (www.estec.esa.nl/tech/spacewire ).
- On-Board Processing V Research into advanced processor architectures for space applications.
- PANGU - Planet surface simulation for the evaluation of vision-based navigation algorithms to be used in future landers.
- Radar Signal Processing - High-speed block adaptive quantisation for compression of raw synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, digital chirp generation, and radar return signal simulation from digital terrain models.
- Satellite Data Reception V Meteosat, NOAA, SeaStar and Terra data collected at Dundee Satellite Receiving Station (www.sat.dundee.ac.uk )
The Space Systems Research Group has a fully equipped laboratory for the development of hardware and software for space applications. These resources include several PCs and Unix workstations, UML based CASE tools, ADSP21020/60 development kit, visual C++, LeCroy 1G sample/sec digital oscilloscope, HP logic-analyser/pattern generator, schematic and VHDL based logic design and simulation software, PCB design tools, FPGA design tools and the usual range of electronics laboratory equipment.
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