SITAEL technology is on board of the ExoMars Space Mission, born from the collaboration between the European Space Agency ESA and the Russian ROSCOSMOS. 

October 21, 2016 – Launched together 7 months ago onboard of a Proton rocket, the orbiter (TGO) and the lander (Schiaparelli) traveled for half a billion kilometers through space bringing the first mission of the ExoMars European Russian space program to the Red Planet.

The orbiter (TGO) has been successfully inserted into the Martian orbit, while the lander seems to have experienced some troubles during the landing (currently under examination) despite those problems, the SITAEL CAN BUS based systems worked properly as confirmed by the telemetries data.

SITAEL started almost twenty years ago the CAN bus development for space application, introducing this technology also on its innovative Small Satellite as the main communication bus. Thanks to SITAEL technology ExoMars becomes the first space mission to adopt the CAN protocol extensively (approximately 50 CAN communication nodes on all three spacecraft).

On the second mission of the ExoMars program planned in 2020, SITAEL CAN bus will be used moreover to enable the on-board computer of the Rover, drive the wheels, manage the energy of the solar panels, control the on-board drill to extract soil samples from underground.