Bob Twiggs
American academic
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Robert J. Twiggs (born November 27, 1935) is an American aerospace engineer. He is emeritus professor of Astronautics and Space Science at Morehead State University.[1]
Stanford University (MS)
Robert J. Twiggs | |
|---|---|
Twiggs in 2009 | |
| Born | November 27, 1935 Blackfoot, Idaho, U.S. |
| Alma mater | University of Idaho (BS) Stanford University (MS) |
| Known for | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Aerospace engineering, Astronautics |
| Institutions | |
He is best known for co-inventing the CubeSat reference design for miniaturized satellites[2][3] along with Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University, now an industry standard for the design and deployment of small satellites.[4][5]
Education
Twiggs earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Idaho in 1961 and a Master of Science in electrical engineering with a concentration in microwave devices from Stanford University in 1964.[6]
Career
From 1985 to 1994, Twiggs was the director of the Weber State University Center for Aerospace Technology. There he led the first student-built satellite from the USA, NUSAT (Northern Utah SATellite).[7]
He served as a consulting professor in the Stanford University Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics from 1994 to 2008. At Stanford, he established the Space Systems Development Laboratory. In 1998, he proposed what would become the first CanSats at a symposium held in Hawaii.[8]
Bob Twiggs became a professor at Morehead State University in 2009[9][10] in an effort to push the PocketQube standard leveraging the university's large aperture (21m) space tracking system, and to help develop a space economy in the state of Kentucky.
In 2019, Twiggs co-designed and proposed another smaller, simpler satellite form factor called ThinSat which could enable high school students to design and build satellites.[11]