All,
On behalf of SIGAda, we are pleased to announce that Dr. Peter Chapin from the Vermont Technical College has won the 2017 Robert Dewar Award for Outstanding Ada Community Contributions.
Here are some highlights of Peter’s contributions to the Ada community:
- Peter developed the tool chain, wrote some of the software and supervised the students writing the rest of the software for the Vermont Lunar CubeSat ( cubesatlab.org ). The software was
written in SPARK/Ada, converted to C with AdaMagic (as there was no Ada compiler for the TI MSP430 processor in the CubeSat) and compiled with a Rowley Associates CrossWorks for MSP430 C compiler. This CubeSat is still the only spacecraft programmed in SPARK/Ada
and the only successful university satellite on the East coast. It was launched with 11 other university CubeSats on November 19, 2013, and was the only one that fully worked. We believe this is due to the high integrity of the SPARK/Ada technology.
- Peter is now coordinating work on CubedOS, a SPARK/Ada implementation of a software framework for small spacecraft. This is intended to be released as an open source project to allow other
groups to have a high integrity software base for their CubeSats, which currently have a very high failure rate.
- Peter is the coauthor, with John McCormick of
Building High Integrity Applications with SPARK, the only book on SPARK 2014.
Congratulations, Peter!
Cheers,
Rick Sward
SIGAda Awards Committee Chair