Alejandro Pastor, the head of Space Surveillance and Space Traffic Management at GMV’s facilities in Germany, was honored with the Space Award at the 28th edition of the ENAIRE Foundation Awards. This newest award category, introduced this year, seeks to encourage and recognize projects or studies that are making a special contribution to air mobility and air and space transportation. Four projects were submitted for this first edition, and the €10,000-prize was awarded to Alejandro Pastor Rodríguez for his PhD thesis on “Advanced observation correlation and orbit determination methods for the build-up and maintenance of a catalogue of space objects”, completed at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid through the Industrial PhD program and in collaboration with GMV.

The panel for the awards, made up of renowned professionals from the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda (MITMA), ENAIRE, Spain's airport management company AENA, Spain's Air and Space Force, and the School of Space and Aeronautics Engineering (ETSIAE), recognized “the project’s quality and practical application in advanced technological developments. It requires a high degree of specialization in the subject, with few experts able to reach the same conclusions. Furthermore, the study can serve as an example and provide inspiration for other researchers to develop future analyses that may question, complement, or improve these projects.”

Alejandro Pastor's thesis addresses the build-up and maintenance of the catalog through the study of orbit determination and data association methods in the field of astrodynamics. The project is focused on current and future operating environments, which require robust and efficient strategies to handle the ever-growing number of space objects and the resulting improvement in detection capacities.

Alejandro Pastor is a space surveillance engineer with over six years of professional experience. He holds a PhD from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and his thesis examined advanced observation correlation and orbit determination for the build-up and maintenance of catalogs of space objects. He has also worked on the correlation and association of observations, objects, and orbits through initial orbit determination and orbit determination methods, including maneuver detection and estimation, covariance realism, measurement simulation, and data fusion.

In 2016, Alejandro Pastor started working for GMV’s Space Surveillance & Tracking Systems Division, and in September 2023, he became the head of Space Surveillance and Space Traffic Management at GMV’s facilities in Germany, where he is in charge of SST and STM activities for GMV’s German branch.

In addition to the award given to Alejandro Pastor, the ENAIRE Foundation also presented the Aeronautical Journalism Award, the I+Dron (R&Drone) Award, the Luis Azcárraga Award for Aeronautical Innovation, and the José Ramón López Villares Award for Undergraduate Theses and Master’s Theses, in the air navigation and airports categories.