von Hoerner & Sulger GmbH

von Hoerner & Sulger GmbH is a privately owned SME based in Germany. The core business of vH&S is the development of new instruments for space applications. Since 1971, vH&S has built and successfully flown in space more than 15 scientific space experiments and more than 30 sounding rocket experiments. With a staff of 23 employees, the company has a lean and efficient structure. The key to our success is our technical competence and close cooperation with our international customers and partners. Even though our contribution may be limited to a subsystem, we always strive to understand the overall system, in order to find the right answer instead of settling for a solution, which may be compliant to the requirements, but far from the overall goal. Our passion is enthusiasm for elegant engineering. vH&S has been building several instruments to analyse the chemical composition of dust in space, which may come from several souces inside and outside our solar system. Projects that fall under this category includes the COSIMA spectrometer on ESA’s ROSETTA mission, which analyzed the chemical composition and the size of the dust particles from the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Another example in this category was the CIDA instrument for the NASA STARDUST mission, sampling interplanetary dust. Our LAD instruments for the US TWINS missions took Lyman-α measurements of the Earth’s corona, and our AC current source provides the electrical stimulus for the PK4HV experiment on the ISS, which observes the formation of plasma chrystals in the absence of the gravitational force. We have also worked on projects such as the ExoMars Rover prototype and the micro-rover NANOKHOD for ESA’s technology and research programme. ICARUS is a project to follow the movements of animals, especially birds across the globe with tiny transmitters. We have build the transceiver which is currently being commissioned on board of the ISS. We welcome you to visit https://vh-s.de to see more