Out of this World Communications Technology

The challenges of interplanetary space travel have led JPL researchers to take a keen interest in certain communications technologies. This talk will provide an overview of the progression of channel codes JPL has developed for space communications, including convolutional, Reed-Solomon, concatenated, turbo, and low-density parity-check codes. The task of the determining the distance to a spacecraft, or ranging, will be discussed in detail, including new research that is making this process more efficient.
Jon Hamkins received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1993 and 1996, respectively. Since then, he has been with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he is the technical supervisor of the Information Processing Group, a group of about ten researchers with interests in information theory, channel coding, source coding, synchronization, networking, optical communications, and mission support. Jon has received several awards for innovations in signal processing, coding theory, and optical communications. He is a co-author of a book on autonomously configurable radios. He co-taught an information theory course at Caltech, and a deep space optical communications course at JPL.