Sir Martin Sweeting G3YJO

Appleton Lecture:
Small Satellites - Big Future

A video of Professor Sir Martin Sweeting, G3YJO, giving the 2010 Appleton lecture 'Small Satellites - Big Future' is now available on the web.

Martin Sweeting, G3YJO, the Chairman of AMSAT-UK, gave the Annual Appleton Lecture to a large audience at The Institute of Engineering & Technology at Savoy Place in London on Tuesday, January 19, 2010.

Speaking as Executive Chairman of SSTL and as a Director of the Surrey Space Centre at the University of Surrey, Martin commented that his initial interest in space went back to his youth and his activities as a radio amateur operating on HF and VHF bands and that, as Edward Appleton had performed much valuable research into the ionosphere, he felt especially honoured to be making the presentation.

His lecture was entitled "Small Satellites – Big Future” and traced the history of the 30+ micro-sats and mini-sats that have been created at Surrey since the early 1980s.
SSTL have many satellites currently under construction and have recently been awarded a contract, with OHB in Germany, for 14 Galileo spacecraft.

He pointed out that the small mass, short development programmes and lower costs of micro-satellites continued to prove an attractive proposition to customers and able to disruptively change the “economics of space”. He added that Moores Law appears to be accurate in relation to the increasing capability of small satellites over the past twenty years as it has done generally in terms of computer power!

He also predicted that we will soon see small satellites going beyond low earth orbit, to MEO GEO, to the Moon and beyond.

The video of the 2010 Appleton lecture "Small Satellites – Big Future” can be seen at
http://tv.theiet.org/technology/communications/
appleton-lecture-small-satellites.cfm
(click on the picture)

AMSAT-UK publish a colour A4 newsletter, OSCAR News, that is full of Amateur Satellite information.
Join online at https://secure.amsat.org.uk/subs_form/

AMSAT-UK
http://www.uk.amsat.org/