Boston, MA — MIT Professor Dr. Kerri Cahoy, an expert in radio occultation, invited Dr. Todd Humphreys to present on development of the FOTON GPS radio occultation receiver. The presentation was an Invited Enrichment Lecture for her graduate-level Satellite Engineering class and other students and faculty of the MIT AeroAstro department.
Coincident with Dr. Humphreys’s visit, students Ingrid Beerer, Clayton Crail, Jason Herrera, Robert Legge, Whitney Lohmeyer, and Annie Marinan from Dr. Cahoy’s Satellite Engineering course presented the final report of their semester-long feasibility study for the GeoScan Project. The students gave an excellent overview of all the sensors that they hope to pack into the hosted payload bay of the 66 IridiumNext satellites, which will begin to be launched in 2015. A GPS-based occultation sensor is one of the primary system sensor instruments proposed for GeoScan. Lars Dyrud, who has been the primary organizer of GeoScan project, was in attendance. Program directors from NSF attended the students’ presentation virtually.
