The third IFAC symposium on automatic control in space: Toulouse, March 1970

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1970
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 333 KB
• Volume: 6
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0005-1098
• DOI: 10.1016/0005-1098(70)90037-3

✦ Synopsis

THIS symposium was exceptionally well organized by chairman Professor J. Lagasse and his vice chairmen M. Pelegrin and G. Giralt. The program included a variety of practical and theoretical papers, 73 in all, with emphasis on applications, and it was selected under the experienced direction of L. Monrad-Krohn, J. A. Aseltine, I. N. Vasiljev and J. Lagasse. The program is given below.

In addition to the selected papers, five invited survey papers were presented as indicated on the program. There were also several films showing recent space accomplishments including two rather dramatic spectaculars: the first Apollo moon landing and the launching and rendezvous of the first Soviet orbiting Space laboratory.

In order to enable delegates to obtain the most information possible, the program was organized without parallel sessions. Of course, this limited the time of presentation, and since the program committee wished to emphasize discussions, the presentation time per paper was strictly limited to 5 minutes. Although authors had been forewarned of this time limitation, it seemed at first that very few of them thought that this time limit would actually be held. Nevertheless, the session chairman did insist on the time limit, and when it became evident that there would be no exceptions, most authors changed their planned presentations. Some authors were more successful than others in adapting to the short time constraint, but others did not understand how they could present details of their work in so short a time. Nevertheless, the successful authors illustrated that meaningful presentations can be given in 5 minutes if they include only the significance of what was accomplished and not the details of how it was done.