Sodern

Sodern is a French manufacturer of optronic equipment for space and defense. It was founded in 1962 to develop and manufacture neutron tubes. The company says it has partnered with demanding customers for over 60 years. It has more than 450 employees, and 60 percent of its staff are engineers.

Sodern designs and delivers high-precision optronic equipment, from star trackers to advanced cameras. These serve telecommunications, Earth observation and scientific exploration missions. Its star tracker range includes Auriga, Hydra and Horus, and the Astradia daytime star tracker. Its space cameras include Auricam and navigation cameras, and it makes multi-spectral filter assemblies for Earth observation.

Sodern's daytime star trackers give accurate positioning day and night in environments where GNSS navigation is denied. The Astradia daytime star tracker was launched in 2025 and is designed for aircraft. It works with an inertial navigation system and does not rely on GNSS radio signals. It also emits no waves.

For defense and security, Sodern provides mission-critical technologies. The company says more than 100 missions have supported national and European sovereignty. Its neutron business covers neutron tubes and generators, and neutron activation analysis for industry, including raw materials extraction. Its material analyzers include the CNA analyzer and probes, and its FastGrade probe is used in mining for real-time resource estimation.

The company's history includes Europe's first Earth horizon sensors in 1974 and its first star tracker in 1975. It produced its first neutron generators in 1978 and the first star tracker on a civil geostationary telecommunications satellite in 1990. The first Hydra star tracker followed in 2012. Sodern built the core of the SEIS seismometer for NASA's InSight mission in 2017.

Partners named on the site include FireFly Aerospace, CNES, NASA JPL, the European Space Agency, Airbus Defence and Space, NASA, Honeywell, Hemeria, JAXA, General Atomics, Thales Alenia Space and Synspective. Sodern's NavCam is on ESA's JUICE mission, and a Hydra Custom star tracker flies on NASA's Europa Clipper.

Services

• Star trackers
• Space cameras
• Earth observation filters
• Daytime star trackers
• Material analysis systems
• Neutron tubes and generators
• Neutron activation analysis
• Defense optronic equipment
• Celestial navigation on Earth
• Access to space products