The Special Sensor Ultraviolet Limb Imager (SSULI) was designed and built by the Naval Research Laboratory's Thermospheric and Ionospheric Physics Branch (Code 7623) to study the "weather" of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere using satellite and rocket-based optical remote sensing of naturally occuring dayglow and nightglow. NRL has developed five ultraviolet remote sensing instruments for the Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) . These SSULI instruments will launch aboard the DMSP block of 5D3 satellites starting in 2000, followed by launches approximately every 18 months.

Silver Engineering, Inc. designed portions of the SSULI Control Electronics (SCE) flight unit. SEI designed the SCE CPU Card, the Telemetry Interface Card (TCI), the Spacecraft Interface Card (SCI), the SEE SEM-E type Backplane, and the SCE Enclosure. All cards utilized surface mount technology and used Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) to reduce the number of cards and reduce power comsumption thereby maintaining the tight weight and power budget requirements.

Silver Engineering, Inc. has particiated with the testing and simulations during the SSULI experiments intergration and test. SEI designed and built the SSULI Aerospace Ground Equipment (SAGE) which simulates all of the interfaces to the SCE. SEI designed and built the SSULI Stepper Motor Driver Simulator which is used to drive the door mechanism during calibration testing of the SSULI instrument. SEI provided the two suite case size test units, SAGE2 and the USA Test Unit for SSULI ground support.