NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft continues to communicate with earth despite being 3 billion miles away and traveling 31,000 miles per hour. At 7:49 a.m. ET Tuesday, it will make its closest approach to Pluto.

How engineers are able to transmit photos and datasets from such cold and remote locations will be among topics of discussion at the IEEE International Conference on Wireless for Space and Extreme Environments (WiSEE) in Orlando, Fla., 14-16 December. http://sites.ieee.org/wisee/

The event is designed to help attendees understand and solve emerging problems facing wireless sensing and communication during spaceflight and in extreme environments such as planetary surfaces, space vehicles and space habitats. It will bring together investigators from NASA, the European Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency and academia, as well as space defense and aerospace industries.

WiSEE, at the University of Central Florida Fairwinds Alumni Center, includes four co-located workshops:

* Space Solar Power
* Passive Wireless Sensor Technology
* Space-Terrestrial Internetworking
* Wireless Sensor Systems

The conference will also feature a 16 December tour of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

BACKGROUND

The many challenges faced in space sensing and communication are extremely diverse and overlap significantly with those found in extreme environments on earth. These environments pose significant challenges for radio frequency and optical wireless sensing and communication and will require the application of a broad range of technologies to generate reliable and cost-effective solutions. Although specific challenges vary significantly from one environment to another, many of the solutions offered by sensing, communication and statistical signal processing technologies can be applied in multiple environments.

CALL for PAPERS

WiSEE organizers are seeking papers and posters by 1 September that address solutions to challenges in the following areas:

* Low-power active wireless sensors, systems & networks
* Passive wireless sensors, systems & networks
* RFID devices & systems
* Protocols & architectures for delay & disruption-tolerant networking
* Network architectures, middleware integration & data management
* Cognitive radio networks
* Localization & tracking over wireless links
* Antenna design, smart antennas, beam forming & multiple-antenna techniques
* Propagation modelling for planetary surfaces & complex multipath environments
* Wireless & cyber security
* Optical communication systems
* Availability, certification & spaceflight qualification for wireless devices & systems
* Integrated vehicle systems

To submit a paper or poster, see http://sites.ieee.org/wisee/call-for-papers/.

IEEE-USA, a financial cosponsor of WiSEE 2015, serves the public good and promotes the careers and public policy interests of more than 200,000 engineering, computing and technology professionals who are U.S. members of IEEE.