Iver Cairns

Iver Cairns has over 30 years of experience in space physics and space weather research, with over 400 written and published refereed papers. His primary contributions relate to the growth and saturation of plasma waves, especially Langmuir waves, the generation of radio emission in association with shocks, and associated space weather. He is a Co-Investigator on NASA's STEREO mission and, since June 2019, on NASA's two new SMEX missions, PUNCH and TRACERS. In Australia he led the 2010-2019 Decadal Plan for Australian Space Science. Since then he has worked to "put runs on the board" to convince Governments to invest in the space sector. He led the INSPIRE-2 CubeSat project, which launched in May 2017 and re-entered still working in November 2018. For 2017–2025, but continuing now as a research collaboration, Prof. Cairns led CUAVA (the ARC Training Centre for CubeSats, UAVs, and Their Applications), training people, solving research problems, and working on commercial outcomes for its industry, academic, and governmental partners. CUAVA's 1st CubeSat, CUAVA-1, was deployed from the International Space Station in October 2021. He also leads the Waratah Seed project, Australia's 1st ride-share satellite project. His satellites CUAVA-2 and Waratah Seed-1 launched in August 2024 and are both operating successfully in space.