Keynote Speakers

Tuesday | March 26, 2024 | 8:45 - 9:25

Imagine navigating at sea using only the rising and setting points of the stars, the direction and intersection of ocean swells, and the flight paths of birds — no charts, compass, or instruments of any kind, just the sea’s own signs of land. 

Steve Thomas is best known as the two-time Emmy Award winning host of PBS’s “This Old House,” the History Channel’s “Save Our History,” and Discovery’s “Renovation Nation.” The other track in his life has been ocean voyaging and navigation. After college he crewed on a racing yacht out to Hawaii, was first-mate of a 103 foot schooner and other vessels in the Mediterranean, and then sailed a 43 foot sloop from England to San Francisco via the Panama Canal, Galapagos, Marquesas and Hawaii.

Tuesday | March 26, 2024 | 11:25 - 12:05

TianQin is a Chinese space-borne gravitational wave detector proposed in 2014, and aims to detect gravitational waves in the frequency range 10⁻⁴ ~ 1 Hz, with three earth orbiting satellites with an orbital radius of about 10⁵ km forming an equilateral triangle with side length 1.7×10⁵ km. The test mass of inertial sensor is used as an inertial reference to provide measurement endpoints and reference points for intersatellite laser interferometry, and the residual acceleration noise in the direction of the sensitive axis (intersatellite link) must be not exceed 10⁻¹⁵ (m/s²)/√Hz within the detection band for TianQin. In this talk, we will give the requirement analysis for TianQin inertial sensor, and current progress, such as the design and manufacture of the test mass, the capacitance sensing and electrostatic control, the charge management, and the performance test with torsion pendulum on the ground and flight validation.

Wednesday | March 27, 2024 | 8:45 - 9:25

Years before we started up the Gartner hype cycle for quantum computing, the inertial community endured another quantum hype cycle: “cold atom interferometers”. We will look back at where the hype came from and the technical challenges to making progress. The trough of disillusionment bottomed out around five years ago or around the time that Frank Narducci, Adam Black, and I wrote our review paper, in part about these technical challenges. One pandemic later, however, practical progress is being made. The presentation will cover recent technical progress including an upcoming space flight experiment of a system with real-world relevance. Finally, we discuss technical and non-technical lessons learned.

Thursday | March 28, 2024 | 8:45 - 9:25

Space applications for inertial sensors will be discussed based on actual space missions. Attitude control is one of the key functions for artificial satellites, and gyroscopes play a key role. Appropriate gyros are selected to meet the mission requirements and resource constraint from various types, such as mechanical gyros, vibrating structure gyros, MEMS gyros and fiber optical gyros.