Martin Sweeting

Sir Martin Sweeting
OBE FRS FREng FIET FRAeS
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 73)[1]
Alma materUniversity of Surrey
Awards
Scientific career
Institutions
ThesisThe communications efficiency of electrically short aerials (1979)
Websitesurrey.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]

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, awarded the Sir Arthur Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award,[citation needed] and named as one of the "Top Ten Great Britons."[by whom?] In 2009 he was awarded the Faraday Medal by the Institute of Engineering and Technology,[9] and an Elektra Lifetime Achievement Award by the European Electronics Industry. In 2014, the Chinese Academy of Sciences award.[10] In 2021 he was a guest on BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific.[11]

References

  1. ^ a b "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. ^ "The Faraday Medallists". 2019. Archived from the original on 18 July 2020. Retrieved 12 October 2020.
  10. ^ "Professor Sir Martin Sweeting scoops Space Research award | University of Surrey – Guildford". Surrey.ac.uk. 6 August 2014. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  11. ^ "Professor Martin Sweeting, inventor of microsatellites". BBC.