Telespazio Innovation Award 2024: the awards ceremony

20 May 2024

Today, in Rome, Telespazio awarded the prizes to the winners of the 2024 edition of the Innovation Award, which is dedicated to innovation and technological development in the space sector.

Now in its eighteenth edition, this year's Telespazio Innovation Award was organised in collaboration with Leonardo's Space Business Unit, so proposals were welcomed from all Leonardo divisions, as well as from Telespazio and its international subsidiaries in Italy (e-GEOS) and abroad. . The aim of the initiative is to enhance the wealth of knowledge and to promote intellectual property in the space sector within the Leonardo group.

As always, there were numerous entries and 34 teams participated from the countries where Telespazio and Leonardo operate around the world. There were four categories in the competition: Best Development 2023; Digital Transformation; Innovative Idea; Space First – Tech and Space First Governance.

The award ceremony, held in Telespazio's general management offices, was chaired by the CEO, Gabriele Pieralli, with the participation of Marco Brancati, Head of Research, Digital & Innovation, and Maurizio Betta, Head of Human Resources and Organisation. The CTO & Capability Business Unit, Enrico Suetta, and People Management & Organisation LDO Business Unit Space, Marco De Leo, spoke for Leonardo.

The winners

The “Best Development 2023” category contest ended in a tie, with two winners.

The winning teams are the Telespazio team (Emanuele Belloni, Berardino Paoloni, Albert Scala and Alessio Montagliani), with the “Spectrum Acquisition to Trigger Interference Analysis and Log” proposal, and the Leonardo team, which includes Andrea Novi, Massimo Marinai, Diego Piccotti, Emanuele Capuano, Marco Taiti, Umberto Barozzi, Giovanni Postiglione and Matteo Burresi, with the “Industrialised process for integrating and testing the 31 high performance telescopes of the PLATO mission” proposal.

Special mention went to two projects in the same category. The first went to the “Global Support Service through Satellite Communication & Remote Assistance Application” project, presented by a team composed by Fabrizio Pattavina and Silvio Pellegrini (Telespazio) and Gerardo Andrea Di Filippo and Juri Barollo from Leonardo's Aircraft Division.  The second project, “Guided Full Resolution Framework: Enhancing PRISMA Pansharpening by Leveraging Deep Learning with Synthetic Data Pretraining and Transfer Learning”, was presented by an e-GEOS team composed by Alessia Tricomi, Giorgio Pasquali, Marco Corsi, Cecilia Sciarretta and Roberta Bruno and by Riccardo Musto (Leonardo Labs).

In the “Digital Transformation” category, Fabio Fiano and Massimo Capozzi from Telespazio were awarded the prize for the “Digital transformation of Satcom GEO Service Management” proposal.

Special mention went to Andrea Bolle of Telespazio, for the “CONSYS – Configuration Control Software for Systems Architecture and Documentation” proposal.

There were two winning projects in the “Innovative Idea” category.

The first is “Mission Digital Twin for Interactive Mission Modeling & Visualization/Validation of Space-Based Scenarios”, presented by a team composed of Luca Andolfi, Alessia De Matteis, Arsenio Maria Di Donna, Federico Fiorini, Giuseppe Tomasicchio and Simone Giannattasio (Telespazio) and Francesco Antonacci (Leonardo).

The second project, “LIDAR Concept based on Coherent Beam Combination technology and fast angular scanning for Space Situational Awareness Systems”, was presented by Fabrizio Giuseppe Bisesto and Alessandro Perna (Leonardo).

Special mention went to the “The New Era of Space Photovoltaics” project, presented by Riccardo Montecucco and Abhishek Kumar (Leonardo Labs).

In the “Space First – Tech” category, the award went to the “Optical alignment automation for imaging spectrometers” project, presented by a Leonardo team composed of Antonio Cosco, Enrico Fossati, Davide Nuzzi, Sandra Amicucci, Stefania De Rosa, Lorenzo Maddii, Carlo Pompei, Samuele Grella and Andrea Amedei.

Two projects deserved special mention.  The first was the “New Adaptive Notch Filtering Approaches for GNSS Interference Mitigation” project, presented by a Telespazio Belgium team composed of Burcu Ozkaptan, Thomas Bouilloc and João Crespo. The second was the “Implementation of cloud-native AI-based system for error detection and classification on large volumes of satellite, aerial and drone ortho images” project, presented by a Telespazio team composed of Angelo De Angelis, Simone Giannattasio and Francesco Sassi, and by an e-GEOS team composed of Marco Arciero, Gerardo d'Andreta and Claudio De Blasio.

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