Nspyre

General
Nspyre B.V. in The Netherlands has a long history in technical automation in general and space in particular. The origin came a.o. from BSO but in fact many companies specialized in technical automation are at the basis of what has become Nspyre B.V. This company had been formed in 1976 and carried out many technical automation contracts for ESA. It has gone through several mergers and acquisitions and the name changed from BSO to Origin to Atos Origin. Until 2009 the company was a division of Atos Origin, an international information technology services company. Beginning 2009, the Atos Origin Technical Automation division merged with Nspyre. Currently it employs 550 engineers specialized in software and systems engineering in technical automation.

Space Activities
The competence of the group is in requirements engineering, real-time systems engineering, simulation and training systems, visualisation, traffic management, and development of enabling technologies. The space activities include support for spacecraft operation, simulation, training, validation and verification, command and control, crew support systems, and multimedia applications.

Nspyre develops technology and components for EGSEs, and operator support amongst others. These components include simulators, hardware-in-the-loop interfaces (MIL1553, Spacewire, CAN, etc.), control systems, GUIs, and infrastructure based on technologies such as HLA, Corba, etc.

As part of the Eurosim consortium, Nspyre is active in the development and maintenance of Eurosim. Eurosim is a high performance and modern simulation platform that is used at ESA and space industry throughout the whole project lifecycle e.g. in ATV, ERA, and Columbus operations.
Nspyre developed and delivered the flight software (including kernel and application layer) for the Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG). In this sophisticated project Nspyre cooperated with EADS/Astrium, Bradford Engineering, ESA and NASA. The MSG is currently flying onboard the Destiny lab of the International Space Station.

In the context of the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), Nspyre was involved in the development and exploitation of several large ground support equipments, including EPOS at DLR (Germany) and EPOS-X at DGA (France). These facilities have proven to be crucial in the final pre-flight validation of the ATV spacecrafts.
For the Columbus programme Nspyre was involved in the development of simulation facilities that support the operations of external and internal payloads, including a.o. EuTEF, EDR and PCDF. These simulators greatly help increasing the efficiency of payload utilisation by a priori validation of operations and by training of ground crew.

Technology Transfer
Our expertise is in developing technical systems, both inside and outside the space domain. Being a well-coordinated entity we bring in cross-fertilization of this expertise in executing projects across defence, medical systems, transportation, and embedded systems. The knowledge gained of space systems and simulation.