Martin Unwin wins Tycho Brahe navigation award
Dr. Martin Unwin from SSTL’s GNSS Receivers team has been awarded the 2011 Tycho Brahe prize for contributions towards space navigation, guidance and control. The prize was awarded at the International Technical Meeting of the Institute of Navigation in Newport Beach, California earlier this year and recognizes Dr. Unwin’s pioneering work in the development of low-cost GNSS receiver technology for spaceborne navigation and remote sensing.
In his acceptance speech, Martin said: "I am honoured, privileged and grateful for the award. My achievements are in a large part due to being in right place at the right time surrounded by the right people. From when I started my PhD, begging for a Trimble receiver to put on PoSat, SSTL has grown 20 fold, and is now building the European version of GPS, and we are selling space receivers across the world. I would like to thank Sir Martin Sweeting, the University of Surrey, all the support from SSTL, especially those who had worked with me on space GNSS, and my family.”
Martin started as a Surrey Space Centre CASE PhD student back in 1991 pioneering the GPS-based autonomous navigation on the University’s PoSAT-1 microsatellite which was launched in 1993. Employed by SSTL in 1995, Martin led the GNSS team for many years. His successes included the design of the Space GPS Receiver series which first demonstrated the feasibility of using commercially available receiver technology in space, and the flight demonstration of GPS-based attitude determination on UoSAT-12 in 1999.
In 2003, Martin was also involved in pioneering work to record ocean surface state using reflected GPS signals from the Disaster Monitoring Constellation. This led to the development of the SGR-ReSI (remote sensing instrument), the team’s latest product, that will fly as part of the Maritime suite on the UK’s TechDemoSat-1 satellite. Dr. Unwin made significant contributions to a GPS experiment and a signal generator flying on the first European GNSS test satellite, GIOVE-A, and is now a Principal Engineer in the GNSS Receivers Team.
