- Boris Smeds
Boris Smeds (born
16 October 1944 ) is a Swedish radio engineer andEuropean Space Agency employee, noted for detecting a critical flaw inCassini-Huygens space mission.Smeds was born in
Uppsala and received hisLicentiate in Technology from the Department of Electrical Measurements at theLund University Faculty of Engineering in 1972. He has spent most of his working life working for theEuropean Space Agency inDarmstadt ,Germany .In 2000 Smeds and other ESA engineers questioned the sufficiency of the previous testing of the Alenia Spazio-built communication system on Cassini, and Smeds and his colleague
Claudio Sollazzo travelled to the Mojave desert for additional tests, discovering that the design of the receiver on the Cassini orbiter had not taken into account the Doppler shifting of the signals from theHuygens probe . The results led to a change in the trajectory of Cassini to work around the problem.A story on Smeds, published in the
IEEE "Spectrum" in October 2004, called him an "unsung hero".ee also
*
Cassini-Huygens
*Huygens probe External links
* [http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/oct04/1004titan.html#f1 IEEE Spectrum: "Titan Calling: How a Swedish engineer saved a once-in-a-lifetime mission to Saturn's mysterious moon"]
* [http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Operations/SEMHJFZ7QQE_0.html ESA: "Modest hero sparks team response"]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
