Case Study: Thales Alenia Space achieves secure, cost-effective SPARC continuity with Stromasys CHARON-SSP

Thales Alenia Space Finds Secure and CostEffective Solution in CHARON-SSP

Thales Alenia Space, a major European space systems company, faced a critical challenge: its mission‑critical IASI interferometer image‑processing software ran on an aging SPARC Sun Fire 480R (Solaris 5.8) and had to remain fully usable and bit‑accurate for the roughly 20‑year life of the instrument. Rewriting, retesting and recertifying the validated applications was prohibitively costly and risky, and the company needed a way to preserve performance, floating‑point precision and X11 functionality without reliance on failing hardware.

Thales Alenia Space deployed CHARON‑SSP/4U running inside Oracle VirtualBox, completing installation, migration and testing in days. CHARON matched the original performance and precision, required minimal user retraining, eliminated hardware‑failure downtime (easy VM failover), and came with 24/7 support. The result was a fast, low‑cost, proven virtual replacement that extended the life of existing applications and ensured uninterrupted IASI processing for CNES.

Thales Alenia Space

Lionel Daniel

Design Authority of Image Acquisition and Processing Test Bench