Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine March 2017 - 3

From the Editor-in-Chief
MARCH 2017

DOI 10.1109/MAES.2017.173001

s every year, this is the time to announce the winner of the H. Mimno Award, recognizing the authors of the best paper published in the Magazine
in 2015. This year the awarded paper, published in the August 2015 issue, is "ESTCube-1 In-Orbit Experience and Lessons Learned", by A.
Slavinskis, M. Pajusalu, H. Kuuste, E. Ilbis, T. Eenmäe, I. Sünter, K. Laizans, H. Ehrpais, P. Liias, E. Kulu, J. Viru, J. Kalde, U. Kvell, J. Kütt, K.
Zalite, K. Kahn, S. Latt, J. Envall, P. Toivanen, J. Polkko, P. Janhunen, R. Rosta, T. Kalvas, R. Vendt, V. Allik and M. Noorma.
Why has the Mimno award committee chosen this paper from among all those that have been
nominated? To recognize the effort of an international group of young researchers and students that
implemented a real system, from the design project to the launch and the in-orbit validation, and
described their work and lessons learned, over five years of development and two of operations, in
a very interesting paper, enjoyable and easy to read for non-experts in the area. This is the type of
contribution we love to publish in the Magazine. So congratulations to all the members of the group
from Tartu Laboratory of Toravere in Estonia on this achievement! Well done.
As a mentioned in one of my previous editorials, there are some areas that we would like to
strengthen with more feature articles and special issues in the Magazine. One is that of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). To this purpose, we enrolled a new Associate Editor for UAS, Giancarmine Fasano.
Giancarmine Fasano currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Aerospace Systems
at the Department of Industrial Engineering, and is a lecturer on unmanned aircraft systems (UAS)
and space flight dynamics.
His research activities in the field of aeronautics have mainly dealt with system design, software
development, and flight tests of sense and avoid systems for UAS. On this topic, he co-authored a tutoFigure 1
ESTCube-1 satellite before delivering it to
rial article recently published by the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine. More recent
the launch provider.
research interests comprise cooperative guidance, navigation, and control
of mini/micro-UAS swarms. In the space field, he is mainly interested in
distributed space systems, focusing in particular on formation flying dynamics, multi-satellite SAR systems, and active/passive vision-based relative navigation.
Prof. Fasano has been Guest Editor of a Special Issue of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine dedicated to Sense and Avoid, and is Member of the AIAA Sensor Systems and Information Fusion Technical Committee.
He co-authored about 90 journal/conference papers and book chapters, which gained several citations within the
scientific literature, and is a reviewer for top-rated journals in the field of aerospace systems.
Now let me introduce the March issue.
The first paper, "Refining Fault Trees Using Aviation Definitions for Consequence Severity" by T. J. Leung and J.
Rife is exactly about UAS. In particular, this article introduces methods that tune certification processes to better match
Prof Giancarmine
FAA standards and to reduce over-conservatism that can delay system certification.
Fasano
The second paper is an historical contribution by F. Giannetti, on "Coltano: The Forgotten Story of a Marconi's
Early Powerful Intercontinental Station". It traces back the history of the radiotelegraphic station in Coltano, whose
construction started in 1905 and where in November 1910, the first test signal was transmitted and then clearly received by the Marconi station in
Glace Bay (Canada), 5360 km away, and by the newly-built Italian colonial station in Massawa (Eritrea), 4160 km away.
The historical article is followed by two more feature articles, "Design and Implementation of Closed-Loop Control System for Buck Converter Using
Different Techniques", by M. Saoudi, A. El-Sayed and H. Metwally; and "Complementary Pair Radar Waveforms-Evaluating and Mitigating Some Drawbacks", by N. Levanon, I. Cohen and P. Itkin. In the former, the authors compared four schemes for DC-DC buck converter output voltage control with a
detailed survey of the output voltage regulation and rise time. In the latter, as anticipated in the title, the drawbacks of complementary-pair radar waveforms
were discussed and evaluated. Spectral efficiency improvement was obtained by altering the code element representation from rectangular to Gaussianwindowed sinc (GWS). It was shown that the cancelling property of range near-sidelobes is maintained, but a penalty of variable amplitude is incurred.
This issue is enriched by an industry insights article on "The Role of the Chief Technology Office (CTO) in a Modern Defense Company", by A.
Farina, A. Sarti, E. Barbi, Z. Burlo, R. Fulcoli, G. Perfetto, I. Picciocchi, L. Timmoneri. This is not the typical technical paper that you can read in our
pages. Instead, it is exactly the sort of topic we think is of greatest interest for our industrial members.
Together with the news & information, the Student Research Highlights article on "Autonomous Quadrotor for Accurate Positioning" closes
the issues. In this article the authors, from the Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora in Brazil, describe the methodology used in the design of an autonomous UAV, based on a quadrotor structure, with an embedded computer system with imaging solutions for high-precision automatic landing.
So, enjoying reading and ciao.
- Maria Sabrina Greco

MARCH 2017

IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine March 2017