Boris Smeds (born 16 October 1944) is a Swedish radio engineer and European Space Agency employee, noted for detecting a flaw in Cassini-Huygens space mission.
Smeds was born in Uppsala and received his Licentiate in Technology from the Department of Electrical Measurements at the Lund University Faculty of Engineering in 1972. He has spent most of his working life working for the European Space AgencyinDarmstadt, 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 the Huygens 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".[1][2]
ESA's staff association awarded him and some of his colleagues a plaque and a small cash prize for their role in saving the $300 million mission [US$300,000,000 (equivalent to about $484,000,000 in 2023)], though Smeds told Spectrum that he is still looking forward to his real reward: "I hope to sit in Darmstadt and see the data coming in on the screen in January."(offline as of 2006-10-14, see Internet Archive version)
When James Oberg [..] suggested to IEEE Spectrum an article[...]As the research for this article progressed, we discovered another reason to print it: the tale of an unsung hero, Boris Smeds. Without him, Huygens's mission would have continued in ignorance of the lurking communications problem—right up until disaster. Smeds's commitment to uncompromising engineering led him to battle bureaucracy and develop the tough test that unmasked the flaw. His engineering instinct and ability to improvise rooted out not just the flaw's existence, but its proximate cause. Smeds's example of what it means to be a great engineer is the most compelling lesson of all.
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