Martin Sweeting

Professor Sir Martin Sweeting OBE FRS FREng FIET FRAeS FBIS MIAA, born 1951, is the founder and executive chairman of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL).^[1] SSTL is a spin-off from the University of Surrey, where Sweeting is a Distinguished Professor who founded and chairs the Surrey Space Centre.^[2]

Sweeting was educated at the University of Surrey in the 1970s, completing a PhD on shortwave antennas. With a team he created UoSAT-1, the first modern 70 kg 'microsatellite,' which he convinced NASA to launch, as a secondary piggyback payload into Low Earth Orbit alongside a larger primary payload. This satellite and its successors used amateur radio bands to communicate with a groundstation 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,^[3] 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.

In 2000 Sweeting was awarded the Royal Society's Mullard Award. 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). In 2008 he was awarded the Royal Institute of Navigation Gold Medal for the successful GIOVE-A mission for the European Galileo system, awarded the Sir Arthur Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award, and named as one of the "Top Ten Great Britons." In 2009 he was awarded the Faraday Medal by the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and an Elektra Lifetime Achievement Award by the European Electronics Industry. In 2014, the Chinese Academy of Sciences award.^[4]

References

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