ESA GNC Conference Papers Repository

The initial exploitation of MEMS devices within the AOCS arena has been based on migrating the use of terrestrial MEMS technology to the space domain and has culminated in the move away from expensive bespoke designs to the use of a standard mass produced MEMS based sensor head. This has addressed part of the cost element, and more importantly provided an order of magnitude improvement in performance from the original designs. The development and qualification of the SiREUS NG10 Inductive MEMS gyro is the forerunner to the planned use of this new sensor head and is capable of utilising future evolutions of the device. The SiREUS NG10 builds on the original SiREUS gyro that have flown on Croosat, Sentinel 3 and MTG missions, and in doing addresses the lessons learnt from the first development programme. The unit has been developed to provide a next generation radiation hardened capability for telecom and EON missions that require a coarse rate sensor. Further development of the gyro unit is based on the migration of the architecture to a software based design that utilises the emerging micro-controller capability to address key cost reduction requirements, whilst maintaining unit performance. The availability of key components in rad-hard and rad-tolerance tolerant form provides flexibility to meet the New-Space market demands. This paper presents the SiREUS NG10 gyro product, its design characteristics/performance, and provides details on the next phase of the development into a reduced cost gyro module; the SiREUS GM20. The view expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Space Agency.