May 12, 2025
Sam Morgan, an aerospace engineering graduate student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, has received the Best Student Paper Award at this year’s IEEE/ION PLANS Symposium held in Salt Lake City, Utah. Competing against more than 200 submissions, Morgan’s paper stood out for its innovation in satellite-based navigation.
The Position, Location, and Navigation Symposium (PLANS) is an international conference that showcases the latest advancements in navigation technology. Jointly sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Institute of Navigation (ION), PLANS brings together a global community of researchers, engineers and professionals working across air, space, marine and land-based navigation systems.
Morgan’s research focuses on a fused low Earth orbit (LEO) global navigation satellite system (GNSS), where communication satellite constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink also provide positioning services. His award-winning paper introduces a method that uses a reference station to send orbit and clock corrections, which, when combined with live satellite signals, allows users to determine their location with about 10-meter accuracy.
This approach could enhance or back up current GPS systems, especially in areas with weak signals, with potential uses in autonomous vehicles, emergency response and global navigation. Morgan noted that the 10-meter result has been improved upon since his paper’s publication, and that centimeter-level positioning results could be possible in the near future.
“We’ve wanted to see fused LEO GNSS come to life for some time now, and it finally has. We’re thrilled that the community sees as much value in it as we do,” said Morgan.
"I had a feeling when Sam first submitted this paper that it would be a contender for the best student paper award. There is a lot of concern presently over GPS interference due to jamming and spoofing, which is now common in Europe.” said Todd Humphreys, a professor of aerospace engineering and director of UT Austin’s Radionavigation Lab.
Morgan worked in collaboration with colleagues within Humphreys’ lab who assisted with experiments and analysis.
