Martin Sweeting

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Sir Martin Sweeting
OBE FRS FREng FIET FRAeS
Cooperation Agreement for a Remote Sensing Satellite Constellation between Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd and The Twenty First Century Aerospace Technology and Beijing Landview Mapping Information Technology (5881315780).jpg
Martin Sweeting and Wu Shuang sign a Cooperation Agreement for a Remote Sensing Satellite Constellation in 2011
Born
Martin Nicholas Sweeting

(1951-03-12) 12 March 1951 (age 74) [1]
Alma mater University of Surrey
Awards
Scientific career
Institutions
Thesis The communications efficiency of electrically short aerials  (1979)
Website surrey.ac.uk/ssc/people/martin_sweeting/

Sir Martin Nicholas Sweeting (born 12 March 1951) is the founder and executive chairman of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL). [2] SSTL is a corporate spin-off from the University of Surrey, where Sweeting is a Distinguished Professor who founded and chairs the Surrey Space Centre. [3]

Contents

Education

Sweeting was educated at Aldenham School and the University of Surrey, completing a Bachelor of Science degree in 1974 [1] followed by a PhD in 1979 on shortwave antennas. [4]

Career and research

With a team he created UoSAT-1, the first modern 70 kg (150 lb) 'microsatellite,' which he convinced the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to launch, as a secondary piggyback payload into Low Earth orbit alongside a larger primary payload in 1981. This satellite and its successors used amateur radio bands to communicate with a ground station on the University campus. During the 1980s Sweeting took research funding to develop this new small-satellite concept further to cover possible applications such as remote sensing, and grew a small satellites research group that launched a number of later satellites. This led to the formation of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd in 1985, with four employees and a starting capital of just £100, [5] and to a know-how technology transfer program, introducing space technologies to other countries. SSTL was later spun off from the University and sold to Astrium in 2009 for a larger sum.[ quantify ]

Awards and honours

In 2000 Sweeting was awarded the Mullard Award by the Royal Society and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in the same year. [6] In recognition of his pioneering work on cost-effective spacecraft engineering, Sweeting was knighted in 2002. In 2006 he received the Times Higher Education Supplement Award for Innovation for the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC). [7] In 2008 he was awarded the Royal Institute of Navigation Gold Medal [8] for the successful GIOVE-A mission for the European Galileo system; and he was awarded the Sir Arthur Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award. [9] In 2009 he was awarded the Faraday Medal by the Institute of Engineering and Technology, [10] and an Elektra Lifetime Achievement Award by the European Electronics Industry. In 2014, the Chinese Academy of Sciences award. [11] In 2021 he was a guest on BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific. [12]

References

  1. 1 2 "SWEETING" . Who's Who . Vol. 1998 (online Oxford University Press  ed.). Oxford: A & C Black.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ↑ Guildford's SSTL leads world in small satellite supply, Clive Cookson, Financial Times , 12 June 2015.
  3. ↑ "Guildford Roll of Honour | University of Surrey – Guildford". Surrey.ac.uk. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  4. ↑ Sweeting, Martin Nicholas (1979). The communications efficiency of electrically short aerials (PhD thesis). University of Surrey. OCLC   500574846.
  5. ↑ Britain's spaceman, The Economist Technology Quarterly Q2 2015, 30 May 2015.
  6. ↑ Anon (2000). "Professor Sir OBE FREng FRS". London: royalsociety.org. Archived from the original on 17 November 2015. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
    "All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." -- "Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 25 September 2015. Retrieved 9 March 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  7. ↑ "Times Higher Awards, SSTL innovation". 2006.
  8. ↑ "Awards - Royal Institute of Navigation". 2020.
  9. ↑ "2008 Sir Arthur Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award". Aviation Week Network . 14 April 2008. Archived from the original on 14 January 2024.
  10. ↑ "The Faraday Medallists". 2019. Archived from the original on 18 July 2020. Retrieved 12 October 2020.
  11. ↑ "Professor Sir Martin Sweeting scoops Space Research award | University of Surrey – Guildford". Surrey.ac.uk. 6 August 2014. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  12. ↑ "Professor Martin Sweeting, inventor of microsatellites". BBC.
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