This Month´s Covers ...

The front cover: the IEEE AESS Pioneer Award for 2007 has been awarded to Robert D. Briskman For the development of commercial communications satellites over the past 40 years. Formal presentation occurred at the Advanced Satellite Mobile Systems Conference Bologna, Italy, in August 2008. The back cover: The Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate (COSMIC) is a joint US-Taiwan project designed to advance meteorology and space weather studies by using GPS radio occultation receivers and other instruments on-board a constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites. On April 14, 2006, six COSMIC satellites were delivered into a low-Earth orbit of 500-km altitude and 72" inclination angle, by one launch vehicle launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. In the coming 19 months, these six satellites were raised, one by one, to the altitude of 800 kilometers, and separated into six different orbital planes with the same inclination angle through the node drift effect of the gravitational pull by the Earth\´s equatorial bulge. The six COSMIC satellites, labeled FM I through FM6, have the same structure and functions. Each carries an IGOR GPS receiver, built by Broad Reach Engineering, derived from the NASA JPL\´s four antenna BlackJack GPS receivers. Two antennas looking above the local horizon collect GPS measurements for Precise orbit determination, and the two other antennas looking slightly below the horizon collect GPS signals for radio occultation.