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Winners of the Second SGAC-IAASS Space Safety Paper Competition Announced 10 August, 2011 This year nine technical papers were submitted from SGAC members in Georgia, USA, Vietnam, Australia, South Africa, India and UK. The SGAC/IAASS reviewer committee had a difficult job for the final selection of the three winners, which was based on the following criteria: technical merit, accuracy, quality and relevance. SGAC and IAASS is proud to announce the winners of the SGAC-IAASS Space Safety Paper Competition. Mr. Chijioke Cj Nwosa (Nigeria), Mr. Steven Pifko (California, USA) and Mr. James Tisato (Australia) who will present their technical papers at the 5th International IAASS Space Safety Conference in Versailles-Paris, France (17-19 October, 2011). More information on the conference is available here and the papers will be available after the conference. For those not selected for this scholarship, there is another opportunity for those authors who submitted a paper to the conference, thanks to European Space Agency (ESA). As part of the ESA Conference Opportunities for Sponsored Students Programme, ESA Education Office offers sponsorship to European students interesting in participating in the conference. The deadline is September 11, 2011. More details are available on the conference website. The competition asked members of the Space Generation Advisory Council to submit a paper on a topic related to any aspect of conference topics, including space system safety, space debris, range safety and commercial orbital/sub-orbital spaceflight safety among others. The IAASS scholarship includes free registration at the conference and gala dinner, plus up to $2000 of reimbursement for documented travel expenses (travel expenses up to: $1250 and other expenses up to $750) for each of the winners. For the titles of the winners' papers, winners' biographies, and more information on IAASS please see below.
Winners' Paper Titles: Mr. Steven Pifko, “A Probabilistic Approach to Modeling and Predicting the Risk of Meteoroid impact to Satellites in Earth Orbit”. Affiliation: Stanford University Mr. James Tisato, “Improved Range Safety Analysis for Space Vehicles Using Range Safety Template Toolkit”, Affiliation: Aerospace Concepts Pty Ltd. Mr. Chijioke Cj Nwosa, “Collision Risk Assessment for a Sun-Synchronous Spacecraft – The Sumbandilasat Case”, Affiliation: National Research Foundation / South African Astronomical Observatory.
About Chijioke Cj Nwosa
About James Tisato
James has previously worked at Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) supporting weapons systems analysis including the development of the Range Safety Template Toolkit (RSTT). He is currently lead software engineer of the flight safety analysis team at Aerospace Concepts. In this role, he has played a critical role in the development of risk hazard analyses for a variety of space launches and weapon systems, including vehicles under the Australian and US joint HIFiRE hypersonics flight research program.
About Steven Pifko
In 2006, Steven earned his master’s degree from the department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University working in the Space Systems Development Lab (SSDL) under Dr. James Cutler and Dr. Andrew Kalman. In SSDL, he worked on the design and development of reusable CubeSat technologies and was a part of research efforts including a Solar-Sailing satellite, the support bus for a deep space transponder payload provided by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and autonomous rovers for lunar missions. Steven earned his undergraduate degree in 2004 in Mechanical Engineering with an option in Aerospace Engineering from the George Washington University, Washington, DC, and has worked in several research and educational positions. During his undergraduate studies, he worked as an after-school tutor for elementary school students. While at Stanford, he has worked as a tutor for high school students and has been a teaching assistant for several graduate level courses. From 2008 to 2010, Steven worked with Quakefinder in Palo Alto, CA, a research group whose goal is to develop earthquake forecasting and alert methods.
About the Prize / Scholarship: There will be three (3) scholarships awarded to the best technical submissions to attend the 5th International IAASS Space Safety Conference in Versailles-Paris, France (17 - 19 October, 2011). Each of the scholarships will include free registration at the conference and gala dinner, plus up to $2000 of reimbursement for (documented) travel expenses for each of the winners (travel expenses up to: $1250 and other expenses up to $750). The paper selection criteria are technical merit, accuracy, quality and relevance. Papers have to be the result of authors’ reserach and shall not have already been presented or published at any other conference/proceedings. Winners will be selected to present their work in an oral presentation or poster at the conference. After the conference, winners will be requested to write a small article for SGAC and IAASS newsletters about their experience.
About IAASS: The International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety is a non-profit organisation dedicated to furthering international cooperation and scientific advancement in the field of space systems safety. IAASS is a member of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF). The association exists to help shape and advance an international culture of space safety (technical, organisational and socio-political) which would contribute to make space missions, vehicles, stations, extraterrestrial habitats, equipment and payload safer for the general public, ground personnel, crews and flight participants. The association will also pursue a culture of safeguarding the on-orbit environment to allow unimpeded access to space by future generations. The IAASS membership is open to anyone having a professional interest in space safety. The organisation strives to include students and young professionals in their technical committees on “Launch Range Safety”, “Space Exploration Safety”, “Re-entry & Space Debris”, “Space Safety Legal Regulatory Committee” and “Human Factors & Performance for Space Safety”. For more information IAASS is also the proud sponsor of the SGAC working group on Space Safety and Sustainability. |
Chijioke Cj Nwosa is a Masters (Space Science and Technology) student at the University of Cape town/South African Astronomical Observatory. His research interests include spacecraft-environment interactions, preservation of the near-Earth space environment, and GIS. He's been involved in spacecraft in-orbit risk assessment, experimental payload design, sounding rocket campaigns, planetary and gravity wave analysis at Antarctica, and space-related outreach programmes in South Africa. He is a Co-lead for SGAC's Space Safety and Sustainability (SSS) Working Group.
James Tisato is a software engineer with Aerospace Concepts in Canberra, Australia. He has extensive experience in modelling and simulation of weapon systems and space vehicles and holds qualifications in computer systems engineering and computer science from the University of Adelaide. Through his work on range safety software, James has developed expertise in complex software systems integration and aerospace vehicle modelling.
Steven Pifko is a doctoral candidate in the department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Steven is working with his adviser at Stanford, Dr. Sigrid Close, in the Space Environment and Satellite Systems Lab, focusing on analyzing the orbital properties of meteor observations from various radars, including ALTAIR, MU, and Jicamarca. In addition, Steven is working with Dr. Diego Janches of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on upgrading the SAAMER meteor radar, located in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, to a system that calculates the astronomical properties of observed meteors. The work with Dr. Janches and Dr. Close is being used to complete Steven’s dissertation on the assessment and modeling of the risk of meteoroid impacts to space missions.