Joon Wayn Cheong

Three Australian research satellites – two built at UNSW – blasted off just after 1 am to the International Space Station, where they will deploy in orbit to explore the little-understood thermosphere. The trio is part of an international QB50 mission, a swarm of 36 small satellites – known as 'CubeSats' and weighing about 1.3 kg each – which will carry out the most extensive measurements ever undertaken of the thermosphere, a region between 200 and 380 km above Earth. This poorly-studied and usually inaccessible zone of the atmosphere helps shield Earth from cosmic rays and solar radiation and is vital for communications and weather formation. One of the three Australian CubeSats is UNSW-EC0, built by UNSW's Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research (ACSER), which will study the atomic composition of the thermosphere along with new robust computer chips and GPS. In this seminar, the technical lead of the UNSW-EC0 mission, Dr Joon Wayn Cheong, will share the story of UNSW EC0, from design, development to deploy in orbit.

Biography:

Joon Wayn Cheong is currently a Senior Research Associate (Postdoc) at the School of Electrical Engineering, University of New South Wales (UNSW). He received his PhD in 2012) and BE (2008) from UNSW Sydney. He is currently involved in Univ. Sydney and UNSW Sydney's CUAVA satellite mission and was the Technical Lead for UNSW's Cubesat mission (UNSW-EC0) and built the first two Australian Cubesats to become operational in space. His research combines GNSS, phased array and signal processing theories with application towards GNSS interference mitigation, GNSS weak signal acquisition, reflectometry-based remote sensing, embedded systems and vehicular networked-navigation.