Canada's CAL Corporation is to supply Lockheed-Martin Astronautics with up to eight CALTRAC star trackers for NASA's Mars 2001 and Genesis space missions. Production begins early next year.

With two spacecraft to be sent every two years, beginning with the first launch in February 2001, and expected arrival on the Red Planet 10 months later, the autonomous high-speed Caltrac device has the capability, claimed to be unique, of supporting satellite spin motion of up to 35 degrees per second. In its application on Genesis, a space science satellite headed for our nearest star, the Sun, the planned slow spin would normally prohibit the use of star tracking technology. Caltrac's high-speed capability means that it can now be employed.

It's the latest feather in the cap of CAL Corp., which, despite its small size-just over 200 employees-has for 22 years has been at the forefront of Canada's space program and which has won itself, and that country, an enviable world place for space science and Earth observation hardware.

The Ottawa company has supplied various optical observation instruments to the U.S., European and Russian space program, together with about 60 state-of-the-art devices for the international space station.

It was CAL equipment which brought to ground-bound Earthlings revolutionary images of the magnetic fields of the aurora borealis with the UV imager launched aboard Sweden's Viking satellite in l986. Latterly it has designed and is assembling Canada's largest space science optical instrument, Windii (for Wind Imaging Interferometer) and continues its work on magnetic fields and the aurora with delivery to NASA of a wind imaging camera for the space agency's January 2000 IMAGE mission.

By Bob Rodwell