The Canadian Academy of Engineering
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FCAE and other Canadians contribute to leadership in spacecraft payloads

Dr. Shen-En Qian, Senior Engineer, FCAE, at the Canadian Space Agency led around 200 rocket scientists at nations’ space agencies (NASA, Europe, Canada, Japan, China, etc.) and world leading space companies as well as Principal Investigators of space missions and delivered a first-ever book in the area entitled “Optical Payloads for Space Missions” after two years collective effort. The book, published by J. Wiley & Sons in January 2016 in UK, has 42 chapters (grouped into 8 parts, 1008 pages) covering all kinds of optical payloads flown, flying or to be sent in space. The book fills the needs of engineers, scientists as well as decision makers in space sector and will greatly benefit international space community.

Dr. Qian was overwhelmingly supported by Canadian scholars. The Canadian team, including government (CSA, EC, DND), industry (COM DEV, ABB, Neptec, MDA) and academia (UofT, York, etc…) contributed a total of 16 chapters to this book, which cover almost all (15) spaceborne optical payloads built in Canada during the last two decades (e.g. WINDII, MOPITT, OSIRIS, ACE‐FTS and MAESTRO onboard SCISAT, Canadian Mars Phoenix Lidar, Sapphire, FGS and NIRISS for JWST and CAMS, etc.). It provided a golden opportunity to showcase the Canadian accomplishments and to promote its space program.

Previously, Dr. Qian, as a sole author, has already written two technical handbooks: Optical Satellite Signal Processing and Enhancement and Optical Satellite Data Compression and Implementation. Both of them have been published by the SPIE Press in USA in 2013. These two books address the lack of literature on optical satellite signal processing.

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