Best paper award at the IEEE Aerospace conference in Big Sky, Montana, USA

© Mark Bentum

The IEEE Aerospace conference is the biggest conference in the field of Aerospace Engineering in the world. Over 800 attendees from academia and industry come together every year in the beautiful place of Big Sky in Montana, USA. In this six day conference over 450 papers are presented.

This year, a team of the University of Twente and ASTRON won the prestigious best paper award. The awarded paper, Frequency Smearing in Full 3D Interferometry, explores the effects that frequency smearing has in the case of a 3D mode of operation, and it is shown to be different from traditional 2D imaging, because the resulting map does not get smeared. A framework is developed to optimize the sensitivity of the telescope in light of the limited achievable data rate to Earth by making a trade-off between decorrelation and observation bandwidth. Simulation results are presented using the Orbiting Low-Frequency Antennas for Radio Astronomy (OLFAR) concept as a case study.

The paper is authored by Pieter van Vugt (University of Twente), Stefan Wijnholds (ASTRON), Arjan Meijerink (University of Twente) and Mark Bentum (ASTRON & University of Twente).

The was the first time an European team won the best paper award and the second time in a row that the best paper award was won in the section on Radio Astronomy and Radio Science, organized by Mark Bentum.

The picture shows the award, the congratulations by the organizer (from left to right: Pieter van Vugt, Mark Bentum and Bob Minnichelli from the Aerospace Company), and a nice view of the location of the conference.