IEEE Journal on Miniaturization for Air and Space Systems

The IEEE Journal on Miniaturization for Air and Space Systems (J-MASS) is a new technical journal devoted to covering the rapidly evolving field of small air and space systems such as drones and small satellites. These platforms offer new, low-cost ways to accomplish a wide range of sensing, measurement, control, and communication functions for applications ranging from agriculture to land use and ocean surveys.

There is tremendous growth in the numbers, complexity, and sophistication of highly miniaturized airborne and spaceborne systems. These small systems include components, modules, sensors, and associated instrumentation, control, communications, power, and guidance/propulsion systems, among many others. The common denominator is the drive to decrease the size, increase the capability, decrease the power consumption, and lower the cost of these systems.  This publication will address the needs of the community of developers, systems architects, and users of highly miniaturized airborne and spaceborne systems and components. Developers of these small, low-cost instrumentation, sensor, control, communication, and propulsion modules, subsystems, and systems will have a forum in which to share their work with the wider community and further spur additional research, development, and commercialization.

In the space environment, for example, CubeSats are a rapidly expanding class of small satellites that offers low-cost access to space. Drones and similar unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are also experiencing high growth rates. Similar to spacecraft, UAVs have associated with them a suite of control, communication, power, and other subsystems. The additional instrumentation and sensor packages deployed on drones invites entirely new applications and sensing capabilities as the costs of these elements decrease. UAVs are a rapidly expanding sensor-delivery mechanism that challenges the technology community with the development of new small and lightweight instruments that can observe many Earth-surface parameters and events such as vegetation, ice cover, water temperatures, methane gas leaks, etc.  The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has recently released “Rule 107,” which makes it possible to use UAVs for commercial applications.