2006 Tycho Brahe Award
Recipient: Dr. Oliver Montenbruck
Citation: For his distinguished achievements in the design
and application of spaceborne GPS receivers for
autonomous spacecraft navigation and formation
flying.
Dr. Oliver Montenbruck has led the
development of miniature GPS receiver (e.g.
Orion and Phoenix) offering sub-meter, realtime
navigation accuracy in orbit. Indeed, Dr.
Montenbruck is a well-known expert in the
field of spaceborne GPS receiver testing and
has contributed to many national and international space projects.
Other GPS receivers developed by Dr. Montenbruck have been used
for the instantaneous impact point prediction of sounding rockets
including Texus, Maxus, Cuma, VSB-30, and Shefex.
Dr. Montenbruck was among the first to think beyond the
single-satellite application of GPS. To serve multiple satellite
applications, he led the early build-up of a hardware-in-the-loop
formation flying test bed. Here, the feasibility of mm-level relative
navigation using GPS was first demonstrated for up to four
spacecraft using realistic space hardware. In a related context, Dr.
Montenbruck devised an innovative orbital control concept providing
a high level of passive safety for formation flying satellites.
His eccentricity-inclination separation concept was successfully
demonstrated during the swap maneuver of the GRACE satellites
and forms the basis of the first operational SAR interferometry
mission, TanDEM-X.
Most recently, Dr. Montenbruck provided a public record of the
new GIOVE-A pseudorandom codes that he and his team recovered
with a high gain antenna.
In addition to his many accomplishments, Dr. Montenbruck
has made important contributions to education. His text books on
positional astronomy and satellite orbits are widely used in university
classes and well recognized in the scientific community.
He has written more than one hundred technical and scientific
papers and holds two patents.
In 2002, his scientific achievements were honored by the prestigious
“senior scientist” award of DLR.