Peter Teunissen, senior professor at Curtin University, was named as Australia’s top researcher in two fields — geophysics and radar, positioning and navigation — by The Australian’s “2021 Research Magazine.” Teunissen, who has seen the field of satellite technology expand at a phenomenal rate over the past few decades, said that dependence on GNSS has penetrated all levels of society. “The timing systems we are using for computers, the synchronization of timing – that’s all linked to GNSS,” he says. “All those satellites are equipped with the most accurate atomic clocks. We are all now dependent on those GNSS systems.”
Teunissen moved to Australia more than a decade ago from The Netherlands and was awarded an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship. He specializes in interferometric GNSS, the use of satellite signals for the high precision measurement of the parameters of water and land masses; has been associated with Curtin University since 2009; and is now an award-winning and internationally-recognized expert in the field of satellite technology.
“Cubesat” mini-satellites increasingly deployed by universities and corporations have also caught Teunissen’s attention, who calls them “the future for increasing the number of satellites and constellations.”