The story
Sodern was created in 1962 in the Philips' Laboratory of Electronics and Applied Physics (LEP) to launch a first generation of external neutron sources.
In the late sixties, Sodern began to diversify its activities towards optical and high-tech space sensors, for which it is today the global leader. In the early 70s, on CNES demand, Sodern realized the first European Earth sensors, sensors dedicated to the attitude control of the experimental telecommunication satellite Symphonie.
In 1975, the European Space Agency (ESA) subcontracted the manufacturing of multiple instruments for the Spacelab. Sodern created a high-precision system for measuring the spacecraft's attitude (orientation) and for fine-tuning its inertial reference. Sodern also delivered SED04 stars trackers for the Instrument Pointing System (IPS) of the Spacelab observatory. These sensors had a precision of 0.75 seconds of arc, thus the precision needed to see "a golf ball from a 10 km [6.2-mile] distance".
Meanwhile, in the mid-1990s, Sodern enhanced its optical instrumentation activity dedicated to Space.
From Wikipedia’s article on Sodern, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4