IEEE Awards Booklet - 2022 - 7

2022 IEEE SPECTRUM'S CORPORATE AWARDS
IEEE Spectrum Technology in the Service of
Society Award
Sponsored by IEEE Spectrum
NASA JPL
IEEE Spectrum Emerging Technology Award
Sponsored by IEEE Spectrum
SunCulture is a climate-smart agriculture company for smallholder
farmers. SunCulture designs, manufactures, finances, and
services IoT-enabled solar energy systems and irrigation equipment,
and it is the market leader in solar water pumping solutions
for smallholder farmers in Africa. SunCulture's mission is to bring
affordable, renewable energy to smallholder farmers in emerging
markets to improve productivity and income, enhance resilience,
and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. SunCulture's products are
designed to lift smallholder farmers up the productivity ladder.
Solar irrigation can increase farmers' household disposable incomes
by 117%. By no longer relying on rain-fed agriculture,
SunCulture customers can increase their yields and number of
harvests, transition to higher value crops, mitigate the risk of a
failed crop due to lack of rain, increase the land they have under
production, increase their livestock output (milk, eggs, etc.), and
save time. SunCulture systems also allow farming households to
gain access to clean energy power for domestic use. To increase
the affordability of its products, SunCulture lends to its customers
through its Pay-As-You-Grow installment plan offering.
Underpinned by the income-generating nature of the systems,
SunCulture is pioneering the financing of smallholder farmers,
who've been historically ignored by the formal financing sector,
and it is building custom credit models and processes to enhance
these capabilities. From a macro perspective, SunCulture's products
improve and protect the productivity of smallholder farmers,
contributing to a food-secure, climate-resilient, and economically
empowered future for Africa and the rest of the world.
On 19 April 2021, the Mars helicopter Ingenuity became the
first aircraft to make a powered, controlled flight on a planet in
our solar system other than Earth. As of this writing, the drone
has made 21 flights on the Red Planet, far exceeding NASA's
initial expectations that the rotorcraft could accomplish up to five
flights during the Martian spring. Ranging in duration from 39
seconds to nearly 3 minutes, the flights have allowed mission planners
to survey the terrain around the mission's rover, Perseverance,
to better plan the rover's excursions. The drone manages to
fly in the thin Martian atmosphere by means of contra-rotating
coaxial rotors, 1.2 meters (4 feet) in diameter, which spin at more
than 2,400 rpm. The drone's solar-charged lithium-ion batteries
have a capacity of about 40 watt-hours. Its autonomous flight is
controlled by two dedicated microcontrollers and a Qualcomm
Snapdragon 801 processor running the Linux operating system.
In the wake of Ingenuity's success, NASA mission planners are
considering much larger rotorcraft drones for future missions, for
which the Ingenuity flights have provided invaluable design data.
Engineers are now working on a Mars Science Helicopter that
would weigh 30 kg, have a range of 10 km, and carry a suite of
science instruments weighing as much as 5 kg.
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IEEE Awards Booklet - 2022

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