Technology
The nervous system and the intelligence.
Pulsar flies the vehicle. Arete makes it smarter every flight. Together they let a small team launch, operate, and learn from every mission with the discipline of a much larger program.
Program 02
Pulsar
Flight Computer
A radiation-tolerant flight computer and real-time software stack that runs every Astroncia vehicle. Pulsar is our chance to eliminate the single largest source of aerospace risk — the software the vehicle actually runs on.
Traditional avionics ship as bespoke boxes with vendor-specific tooling. Pulsar is designed as a platform: one board family, one OS, one deterministic bus. Every Astroncia vehicle — Starlight and everything after — runs the same core stack, tested against the same simulator, debugged with the same tools, and continuously improved by models developed on Arete.
Class
Flight computer, avionics stack
Processor
Multi-core, redundant lockstep
Radiation
SEE-hardened, TID-tolerant
Bus
TSN Ethernet + CAN-FD
Real-time OS
Preemptive, deterministic, in-house
Certification target
DO-178C spirit, ECSS aligned
Program 03
Arete
Open-Source AI Research Platform
Arete is Astroncia's open-source AI research platform, free for researchers everywhere. It gives labs, students, and independent scientists the same training, evaluation, and deployment pipeline we use in-house — so the next breakthrough in autonomous flight can come from anywhere, not just from us.
Platform capabilities
Arete, at a glance.
Class
Open-source AI research platform
License
Permissive open source — free for researchers, labs, and students
Focus areas
Guidance, vision, autonomy, anomaly detection
Stack
Training, evaluation, and deployment pipeline — reproducible end to end
Compute
Runs on commodity GPUs, HPC clusters, and Pulsar-class edge inference
Data
Public telemetry, imagery, simulation, and hardware-in-the-loop datasets
Community
Open contributions, shared benchmarks, published research