The General Director of Space and Science at SENER Aeroespacial, Diego Rodríguez, presented to the local media the new integration, testing and production facilities for space and astronomy systems and devices. Located in SENER's offices in Cerdanyola del Vallés, Spain, a sustainable and modern building designed by its own team of architects, on a 7,500 m2 plot with an above-ground GFA of 16,000 m2, the building houses over 300 professionals from different disciplines, including engineers, mathematicians, physicists and architects.
Accompanied by Albert Febrer, head of the Communications Division Production Area, Rodríguez gave a tour of the 1,000 m2 white room, which is under controlled conditions and constantly monitored for temperature, humidity and particles, in accordance with the standards of the space industry. This room is divided into:
• a 750 m2 ISO-8 (or class 100,000) white room for automated manufacturing, assembly benches to integrate equipment and subsystems, and equipment for functional and environmental testing
• a 250 m2 ISO-7 (or class 10,000) white room for producing hybrid microwave circuits.
The white rooms are equipped with all the means required to manufacture and validate electronic equipment onboard satellites, as per the standards of the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, as well as of the main satellite manufacturers in Europe and the U.S. They also incorporate the most advanced production and testing equipment at present. Currently, some 40 production personnel work on projects for ESA, such as Meteosat Third Generation, Metop Second Generation and Biomass, and also for the commercial market, with equipment for Spainsat Next Generation and the OneSat platform.
In statements by Rodríguez, he noted the significant investment in high-tech equipment, "This investment exceeds 5 million Euros, which is on top of the 70 million invested previously in 2018 with the acquisition of the TRYO Aerospace & Electronics group. In total, this 75-million Euro investment consolidates SENER Aeroespacial's capabilities in communications systems for specific applications that are not only relevant to institutional or commercial space markets, but also to land-based communications markets (civil applications in Air Traffic Control and Broadcast)."