About 300 top scientists, physicists, engineers, venture capitalists and legal specialists from around the world gathered at the CANEUS 2006 conference, held last month in Toulouse, France, to discuss breakthroughs in the use of micro- and nanotechnologies (MNTs) for satellite and commercial defense avionics applications. Participants -- up 20 percent from CANEUS 2004 -- represented many countries in North and South America, Europe and Asia. CANEUS is an aerospace trade group of developers, aerospace end-users, governmental policy makers and investors from Canada, Europe, the US and Japan. The Centre for Large Space Structures and Systems (CLS3) was responsible for pioneering the formation of the joint Canada-Europe-USA-Asia (CANEUS) organization for the advancement of MNT for aerospace applications. The CLS3 hosted the first CANEUS workshop in August 2002. Co-hosts included the CANEUS organization, France’s CNRT (Centre National de Recherche Technologique Aéronautique Espace) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). Strategic partners included Aerospace Valley France, CLS3, the CNRS and NASA. "Interest in the conference was intense and spanned a very wide range of applications," the organizers said. "The conference provided a useful venue for introducing MNT products to the market." Conference highlights included inspirational keynote speeches by Minoo Dastoor, senior advisor to the associate administrator, Office of Aerospace Technology, NASA, and Hirobumi Saito, director of missions at Japan’s Space Agency’s (JAXA’s) Institute of Space and Aeronautical Sciences (ISAS). It also featured 85 technical and 54 poster presentations, as well as six panel sessions. Other highlights included a welcoming reception hosted by the Aerospace Valley, a soiree hosted by the Office of the Mayor of Toulouse, a cocktail gala hosted by the Canadian Dept. of Foreign Affairs and a CANEUS-sponsored gala at the Château Launac. Industrial visits included a tour of Airbus’ A380 Aircraft manufacturing facility and laboratory tours at Alcatel-Alenia and the French Space Agency. The Nano-Pico Satellite (NPS) Industry Working Group, an international body, convened at the conference to establish standardization practices for small satellites. The group proposed using the same approach adopted by SEMI (the Semiconductor Industry Association) for addressing the needs of NPS satellite programs in order to move MNT technology forward worldwide. Efforts were made by the CANEUS Workshop Group to create a $5 million fund for the CANEUS NPS Pilot Project. "This conference showed the need for CANEUS to act as a facilitator to promote MNTs’ benefits of low cost, small size and low power to the designers, supplier and end-user communities," said Milind Pimprikar, CANEUS’s founder and chairman. Pimprikar is also president of the Centre for Large Space Structures and Systems Inc. (CLS3), a Canadian R&D effort based in Montreal. "Our goal is to increase our membership in order to successfully move MNT forward commercially, by establishing and promoting collaboration and cooperation between aerospace companies, space agencies, defense organizations and other industries engaged in MNT education and technology development for aerospace applications," he added. The next CANEUS meeting, scheduled for October 2008 in Tokyo, will be hosted by JAXA. For more information, visit: www.caneus.org