CALCON 2024 14 - 15 December, 2024

Chandrakanta Kumar received M. Tech and PhD in Radio Physics and Electronics from the University of Calcutta, and completed Space Studies Program, from International Space University, Strasbourg, France.

He joinedU R Rao Satellite Centre in 2001 and responsible fordesigningantennas formore than 20 Indian spacecrafts and related ground stations, that include Chandrayaan-1 and 2, Mars Orbiter Mission, Moon Impact Probe, ASTROSAT, Deep Space Network Stations, to name a few. He has served as project manager, antenna systems, for three spacecrafts and deputy project director, RF Systems, for two spacecrafts. At present he is the project director of an upcoming mission of ISRO.He has supervised three PhDs and has more than 150 publications including 58 in IEEE Journalsand published a book on 'Defected Ground Structure (DGS) Based Antennas' from IEEE Press Willy/USA.

Dr. Kumar is a fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), The National Academy of Science, India (NASI), West Bengal Academy of Science and Technology (WAST) and IETE. He is a senior member of IEEE USA. He is the chair-elect (2024) of the IEEE Bangalore Section and Chair (2024) of its MTT-APs joint chapter. He is a recipient of 'Young Scientist Merit Award' and 'Team Excellence Award' from ISRO; and 'Hari RamjiToshniwal Award' and 'Prof. S. N. Mitra Memorial Award' from IETE and six best paper awards in conferences.He is an associated editor for IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters. He has actively steered, in different active roles, seven IEEE conferences.

Abstract: Design of wireless communication channel is a very specialized task even for a terrestrial link. Thechallenges increases multi-fold for deep space communication links for communicating with a spacecraft.The onboard systems have to adhere to multiple constraints like low mass,small volume, low power, etc., as well as they need to server multiple purposes like supporting telemetry, tracking, command, data transmission applications. Sometime multiple antenna systems need to be deployed to support the mission, on the other hand in many cases, multiband links sharea common antennaonboard. Specialized designs to be employed for the ground station to extract the advantage of large aperture that is generally used for such communication. Thegain of antenna overits noise floor (G/T) should be high enough to receive very weak signals reaching the ground station from the spacecraft.

This talk highlights specific tasks that is accomplished through the deep space RF communication links. Some intricate design aspects onboard;handling low power receiver, high power transmitters and antennas will be discussed. Theantennas for deep space network stations (DSN) employs beam wave guide (BWG) feed systems for simultaneous low noise and high power operations. Some specific aspects to such design also will be elaborated.

Prof. Asif Ekbal Asif Ekbal is currently a Professor in the School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, IIT Jodhpur. He has been pursuing research in Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Applied Machine Learning since the last 18 years; and authored around 300 papers in top-tier conferences and journals. His research is funded by both Govt (Meity, SERB, MHA etc) and Industries (e.g. Accenture, Flipkart, Wirpro, Elsevier etc)

He has been serving as a PC Chair, Area Chair, Senior PC member, PC member, reviewer to several well-known conferences like EMNLP, AAAI, EACL, HLT/NAACL, AAAI, IJCAI, EMNLP, ACL etc. He is the Associate Editor of ACM TALLIP; Editorial board member of Computer Speech and Language, Elsevier; Academic Editor, Plosone; Action Editor, Neural Networks, Elsevier; Editorial Board Member, Natural Language Processing, Oxford University Press, etc.

He is an awardee of 'Best Innovative Project Award' from the Indian National Academy of Engineering', Govt. of India, 'JSPS Invitation Fellowship' from Govt of Japan and 'Young Faculty Research Fellowship Award' of the Govt. of India. He is listed in the top 2% scientists, published by Stanford University (2021, 2022, 2023), and is in the list of top computer scientists, published by Research.com (2022, 2023, 2024).