The award for the best space-related thesis has been given by NIFRO (the Norwegian space industry association) since 2013. It is usually handed out at NIFRO's yearly meeting - the Space Dinner. However, due to Corona, this year it was awarded at a digital meeting. We are proud to congratulate Ole Martin Borge receiving the prize for his work!

Remote sensing satellites with advanced cameras can capture signals reflected of the ocean and extract information about the composition of matter in ocean from these images. One example is detection of plankton. A problem with this is that the satellite also will detect signals from the atmosphere, which makes it a challenge to determine what part of the detected signal originates from the ocean.

The figure shows all the different signals the satellite picks up, where L_wc is the component we want. ​​​​​​​

In his master’s thesis, Ole Martin developed mathematical models that can be used onboard the satellite to remove the atmospheric effects, and then calculate the parts of the signal that comes from the ocean. The main contribution of the thesis was to identify good mathematical models that can correct satellite images from areas near the coast, where the water is murky and currently used models can yield inaccurate results.