Bright Ascension Ltd

Flight, ground and payload software for small satellites

Bright Ascension Ltd is a UK space software company, founded in 2011 to offer a fresh approach to software for space. Its team has experience from the space industry and from other high-technology sectors, and the company says reliability has to sit at the heart of even the most novel solutions. It focuses on the small and nano-satellite market, where its software is designed to be customizable for any payload and mission.

The HELIX product family

The company describes its HELIX family as an integrated, end-to-end space software suite, running from flight software to ground operations and data-insight applications. It says HELIX is meant to connect fragmented space software systems and lower the cost of ownership. Its components are Flightkit, a development setting for flight software suited to each mission; Ops, for watching and adjusting onboard changes while a mission is being built and flown; Groundkit, a ground-side software setting assembled from components that can be reused; and Edge, a payload software bundle that answers the core needs of a usual mission out of the box.

GenerationOne flight software kit

GenerationOne is a flight software development kit with heritage from the UKube-1 mission. The company sells it as a product in its own right, and says it can also form the basis of bespoke software for a customer, which can be adapted quickly as requirements change.

Engineering consultancy

Beyond its products, the company works as a consultancy of engineers who solve research and development problems, usually on or off site and fitted to a client's own practices. Its main engineering areas are software, from desktop applications to real-time embedded systems; hardware, including PCB design and high-speed FPGAs; and space engineering, where its staff have worked on communications, space environment simulation and artificial intelligence.

Missions the company names

The company names several missions its technology has supported: OS-VOLT, a multi-million mission that its HELIX suite is intended to power; the Faraday Phoenix mission, which lets several third-party payloads share a single satellite; the IOD-1 mission, an early step in a government service programme; SeaHawk, which observes the changing biology of the ocean surface; and the PICASSO CubeSat, built for the European Space Agency to study the upper atmosphere.

Research and standards

The company says it is heavily involved in research and development and in standards work across the industry, including through space agencies and international bodies such as CCSDS. It describes its engineering approach as moving quickly, with quality as the foundation.