Astradia star tracker designed to fill in for GNSS

Sodern announces the commercial launch of Astradia, a daytime star tracker which, when combined with an inertial navigation system, allows more precise and robust navigation under GNSS-denied environments.

Specifically designed for civil and military aircraft, Astradia can operate day or night guided by stars. Astradia offers tracking capacity to within a few arc-seconds, equivalent to 1 meter at a distance of 70 km. This function, which is extremely useful for aligning inertial navigation systems or its registration during mission, opens the door to applications with demanding tracking requirements, including stealth missions.

The sensor delivers measurements to the aircraft without interruption, providing operational capacity at any point on Earth, including over the oceans, with no need to update maps or charts in order to carry out the mission. This sensor effectively reduces navigation drift during long flights and more generally improves the security of in-flight positioning.

Astradia is an endo-atmospheric star tracker that provides daytime and nighttime attitude measurement, for precise, robust and reliable onboard geopositioning data. It helps counter the natural drift in inertial navigation systems. It also offers the advantage of emitting no waves, which could otherwise expose an aircraft to detection.

Astradia is compact (176 mm x 185 mm x 207 mm) and weighs less than 3 kg. It was specifically designed for easy integration on all types of aircraft. This optimized design makes Astradia ideal for a wide range of applications, including drones and surveillance aircraft.

Several thousand of Sodern’s star trackers are already in service, along with a star catalogue and proven detection algorithms. This technology has also undergone conclusive in-flight testing.

Astradia will be featured at the Sodern stand during the 2025 International Paris Air Show.