Research instrument manufacturer becomes growing player in space industry

CreoTech Instruments manufactures and supplies precise measuring instruments for research institutes around the world and carries out projects related to the study and exploration of outer space. Products based on the company’s own technological solutions and patents have been used by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the Institute for Heavy Ion Research and the German Electron Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg, among others.

President of CreoTech, Grzegorz Brona, co-founded the company with two friends in 2008. As a child, he loved science fiction books and dreamed of working in the space industry. He started his career as a physicist at CERN, where he was responsible for the radiation detectors’ software and management of the research team at the Large Hadron Collider. Brona lectures in the physics department at the University of Warsaw and has been a member of the Polish Space Agency since 2015, after being nominated by the prime minister.

CreoTech has four departments: scientific instruments, industrial equipment, contract electronics, and space industry. The company launched into the latter with the development of the K20 “Pi of the Sky” camera telescope, which is designed to search the cosmos for gamma ray bursts.The camera allows scientists to observe the brightest flash in the gamma ray spectrum.

The company is certified by the European Space Agency (ESA) to assemble electronics for space flights—making it the only Polish company to have passed the ESA’s strict requirements for component assembly.

CreoTech’s cleanroom features a double air lock, air filters and mandatory protective suits to prevent dust from contaminating the equipment. With facilities for mechanical prototyping and serial production, electronics are assembled in compliance with the highest international standards.

Since the completion of the “Pi of the Sky” project, the company has also constructed cameras for the wide-view NEOSTEL telescope and developed a power converter module for the CaSSIS stereo imager for the joint Russo European ExoMars mission to Mars.

In partnership with the Space Research Center in Warsaw, CreoTech is producing a coronagraph control box which will be used on the ESA’s PROBA 3 project—the world’s first precision formation flying mission. It is set to launch in 2018 and the control box will research the sun’s corona.

In an effort to bring the space sector to Poland, CreoTech developed the EO Cloud project, which is a data repository based in Poland to collect, store and analyze information transmitted by ESA satellites. A centralized EO Cloud will improve accessibility to data which is otherwise stored in various centers around the world.

The company’s headquarters is located just south of Warsaw, in Piaseczno. CreoTech works with students and graduates from the Warsaw University of Technology, the University of Warsaw and the Space Research Center. In 2014, CreoTech Instruments received funding from the Polish government.