SmartSat Distinguished Speaker – Dr Jose Velazco

Technical Supervisor, Advanced RF & Optical Technologies Group, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Dr. Jose Velazco is the technical supervisor of the Advanced RF & Optical Technologies Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he conducts advanced research and development of new RF and optical technologies and systems for telecommunications, as well as new instrumentation and radar for space exploration. He has over 25 years of experience conceiving and carrying out numerous R&D projects. During the past 5 years at JPL he conceived, developed and patented various cutting-edge technologies including an inter-spacecraft omnidirectional optical communicator and an optical ground terminal. He has also been involved in the development of advanced communications microwave and millimeter-wave transmitters as well as high sensitivity receivers for NASA’s Deep Space Network. Prior to joining JPL, Dr. Velazco was the President and Chief Technologist of Microwave Technologies where he gained extensive experience implementing wideband receivers for electronic surveillance, megabit ground optical communicators, all-digital phase array radar and a multitude of vacuum tube devices, including a novel electron accelerator. Recently he has focused his work on the development of advanced multigigabit optical communicators for applications in space, smart cities and the internet of things. His current research focuses on various small spacecraft mission concepts for low-Earth-orbit, Lunar, and Deep Space applications with the goal of enabling an all-optical spaceborne network. He aims to implement a new inter planetary network architecture along the solar system that uses swarms of optically-interconnected spacecraft as networks for fast communications and novel science. He envisions the inter planetary network as the basis for the space internet.