Robert J. Twiggs
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Bob Twiggs at the 2009 Summer CubeSat Developers' Workshop in Logan, Utah, United States
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| Born | (1935-11-27) November 27, 1935 (age 88)
Blackfoot, Idaho, U.S.
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| Fields | Aerospace engineering, Astronautics |
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Robert J. Twiggs (born November 27, 1935) is an American professor of Astronautics and Space ScienceatMorehead State University.[1] He is responsible, along with Jordi Puig-SuariofCalifornia Polytechnic State University, for co-inventing the CubeSat reference design for miniaturized satellites[2][3] which becameanIndustry Standard for design and deployment of the satellites.[4][5]
Twiggs earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the University of Idaho in 1961 and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering with a concentration in microwave devices from Stanford University in 1964.[6]
From 1985 to 1994, Twiggs was the director of the Weber State University Center for Aerospace Technology. He served as a consulting professor in the Stanford University Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics from 1994 to 2008. At Stanford, he established the Space Systems Development Laboratory. Bob Twiggs became a professor at Morehead State University in 2009[7][8] in an effort to push the PocketQube standard leveraging the university's large aperture (21m) space tracking system, and to help develop a space economy in the state of Kentucky.
In 2019, Twiggs designed and proposed another smaller, simpler satellite form factor called ThinSat which could enable high school students to design and build satellites.[9]
When professors Jordi Puig-SuariofCalifornia Polytechnic State University and Bob Twiggs of Stanford University invented the cubesat a little more than a decade ago, they never imagined that the tiny satellites would be adopted by universities, companies and government agencies around the world. They simply wanted to design a spacecraft with capabilities similar to Sputnik that graduate student could design, build, test and operate. For size, the professors settled on a 10-centimeter cube because it was large enough to accommodate a basic communications payload, solar panels and a battery.
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