About IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings

IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings

IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings is the published record of the IEEE Aerospace Conference — widely known as AeroConf — an annual, week-long, winter conference held at Big Sky, Montana, in the United States. It is a conference proceedings series, not a conventional journal. That distinction is the key to understanding everything about it: its ISSN 1095-323X, its publisher listing, its cadence, its editorial structure, and the way its papers should be read and cited. Each year the conference brings aerospace experts, academics, military personnel, and industry leaders together at the Yellowstone Conference Center in Big Sky to present peer-reviewed papers on aerospace systems, their underlying science and technology, and their applications to government and commercial work. The proceedings collect those papers, and IEEE distributes them, principally through IEEE Xplore, as the durable scholarly record of that year's meeting.

On Journals World the record gives ISSN 1095-323X, lists IEEE Computer Society in the publisher field carried from indexing sources, describes subject coverage spanning earth and planetary sciences and engineering, and records an h-index of 81 and a SCImago Journal Rank of about 0.452 in its snapshot. The publisher field needs careful reading, as explained below: the conference is an IEEE conference, sponsored within IEEE's aerospace community and technically co-sponsored in recent years by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the Prognostics and Health Management Society, with proceedings published by IEEE. A profile that simply repeats a single society name without explaining that structure would mislead a reader who is trying to submit a paper, find the organising office, or cite a paper correctly. This profile therefore describes the event, its history and setting, its fourteen-track technical programme, its paper process from abstract to final manuscript, its plenary and junior programmes, its indexing and metrics, and the practical guidance its own calls for papers give to authors.

Quick facts

What this record represents — and what it does not

Proceedings series are often misdescribed in journal directories because directories are built for journals. A journal has an editor, a volume, and a continuing submission window. A conference has a chair, a programme committee, a place, a week, a deadline, and a community that meets in person. The IEEE Aerospace Conference has all of the latter. Its call for papers is issued for a specific March meeting; its abstracts are due the previous summer; its papers are reviewed against that meeting's schedule; and its proceedings exist because those papers were presented, or prepared for presentation, at Big Sky.

It follows that there is no point in looking for a journal-style issue schedule, a journal impact factor in the ordinary sense, or a rolling submission portal that accepts papers at any time. There is instead a highly predictable annual cycle, described in detail below, and a proceedings record indexed as a serial under ISSN 1095-323X so that libraries and citation databases can treat each year's volume consistently. The h-index of 81 carried on the Journals World record is best understood in that light: it measures the accumulated citation reach of many years of proceedings papers — thousands of contributions across space missions, communications, remote sensing, software, and systems engineering — not the citation performance of a single journal's articles in a single window.

It also follows that authorship here is conference authorship. Papers are presented in technical sessions organised by track and session organisers, discussed in the room, and — in a feature the conference deliberately cultivates — discussed again in the informal settings that a residential winter conference makes possible. The organisers state explicitly that dinners and networking activities are intended to promote technical discussion and long-term professional and personal relationships. That is not decorative language. In aerospace, where programmes run for decades and teams span agencies, prime contractors, universities, and laboratories, the relationships formed at a recurring meeting are part of how the field coordinates itself.

The conference and its setting: Big Sky, Montana

The conference describes itself, in its 2023 call for papers, as the 44th in a series of annual, week-long, winter conferences, held that year from 4 to 11 March 2023 at the Yellowstone Conference Center in Big Sky, Montana. The 2024 meeting ran from 2 to 9 March 2024, and the 2025 meeting — described in listings as the 46th IEEE Aerospace Conference — ran from 1 to 8 March 2025, also at Big Sky. That sequence confirms both the annual numbering and the stable early-March, week-long pattern. The conference office address given in calls for papers in the mid-2010s was in Manhattan Beach, California, while the meeting itself remained at Big Sky — a useful reminder that the organising office and the conference venue are different things, and that correspondence should be directed through the conference website rather than to the resort.

The choice of a residential mountain venue, away from a major city, is deliberate and long-standing. Attendees stay, eat, and meet in the same place for a week. Plenary sessions, technical sessions, catered dinners, and informal evening gatherings — the schedule includes evening technical sessions and what the programme calls fireside discussion periods after dinner — are arranged so that a presenter is accessible to interested readers for days, not for the fifteen minutes after a talk in a convention centre. The conference's own description stresses exceptional access to authors and invited speakers in a setting suited to developing lasting relationships that benefit participants, their organisations, and the engineering, scientific, and aerospace communities. Readers who have only encountered the proceedings as PDFs in IEEE Xplore should picture that setting when they wonder why the same author groups, laboratories, and mission teams return year after year.

Sponsorship and organisational structure

The IEEE Aerospace Conference is an IEEE conference. Its calls for papers identify AIAA and the PHM Society as technical co-sponsors in recent years, and IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society material lists the IEEE Aerospace Conference among the conferences the Society sponsors, bringing together researchers from government, industry, and academia across its technical domains. The Journals World and indexing record's publisher field naming IEEE Computer Society reflects how proceedings publication has been attributed in some bibliographic sources; it should not be read as a claim that the Computer Society alone organises the meeting, and authors should follow the conference's own site for committee information in any given year. Where sources differ in attribution, this profile reports the conference's own call-for-papers wording first, because that is the document an author actually submits under.

Governance is by a conference chair and a programme organisation built around tracks and sessions. Calls for papers in the 2010s name a conference chair, session organisers for individual sessions, and a Junior Engineering and Science Conference chair and vice-chair for the associated student programme. In the modern conference site, programme information is organised under tracks and sessions, with session organiser contact addresses published on the site's programme pages, and author instructions are given centrally: presentation length, schedule lookup, and what to bring to Big Sky are all specified by the conference office, not left to individual tracks. Both a presenter and at least one co-author must be registered for a paper to be published, under the rules stated on the current conference site — a standard IEEE conference publication requirement that authors should note when planning travel and budgets.

Scope: the fourteen tracks

The call for papers invites papers reporting original work or state-of-the-art reviews that enhance knowledge of four broad things: aerospace systems, science, and technology; applications of aerospace systems or technology to military, civil, or commercial endeavours; system engineering and management science in the aerospace industry; and government policy that directs or drives aerospace programmes, systems, and technologies. The technical programme then organises submissions into fourteen tracks, as listed in the 2023 call and reflected in later programme material. Each track below is described in terms of the work it actually gathers.

1. Science and aerospace frontiers — plenary sessions

The first track consists of plenary sessions: keynote-style addresses by leading scientists and leaders in government and industry. These set the conference's agenda, presenting major missions, discoveries, and programme directions to the whole community rather than to a specialist room.

2. Space missions, systems, and architecture

Mission design, system architecture, and concept studies for space missions — the track where a proposed observatory, lander, or constellation is presented as a whole system, with its science case, engineering design, cost drivers, and risks considered together.

3. Antennas, RF and microwave systems, and propagation

Antenna design, radio-frequency and microwave hardware, and propagation — the physical layer on which deep-space, near-Earth, and aeronautical communications depend.

4. Communications and navigation systems and technologies

Communication links, networks, navigation, and positioning technologies for space and air systems, including the delay-tolerant and high-rate techniques that distant missions require.

5. Observation systems and technologies

Instruments and systems for observing Earth, other planets, and the space environment — sensors, telescopes, and the systems engineering that turns a measurement idea into a flight instrument.

6. Remote sensing

Remote-sensing methods, missions, and data applications, closely related to observation systems but centred on the measurement techniques and their scientific and operational uses.

7. Avionics and electronics for space applications

Flight electronics, avionics architectures, radiation-tolerant design, and the computing and power electronics that must survive launch and the space environment.

8. Spacecraft and launch vehicle systems and technologies

Spacecraft buses, subsystems, propulsion, structures, and launch vehicles — the vehicles themselves, presented at system and subsystem level.

9. Air vehicle systems and technologies

Aircraft and air vehicle systems, extending the conference beyond spaceflight into aeronautics, uncrewed air systems, and flight technologies.

10. Software and computing

Flight software, ground software, autonomy, simulation, and computing architectures. As spacecraft become more autonomous and missions more software-defined, this track has grown in importance relative to a purely hardware-centred programme.

11. Diagnostics, prognostics, and health management

System health monitoring, fault detection, prognostics, and management of ageing or degrading systems — the track that connects most directly to the PHM Society's technical co-sponsorship.

12. Ground and space operations

Mission operations, ground systems, and the human and software systems that fly a mission after launch. Many technically excellent missions succeed or fail in operations, and this track gives that work a first-class venue.

13. Management, systems engineering, and cost

Systems engineering methods, programme management, cost estimation, risk, and lessons learned from real programmes — including, characteristically, candid accounts of what went wrong and what it cost.

14. Government plans, policies, and education — panels

High-level panels on government plans and policy and on education, closing the loop between the technical programme and the public programmes that fund and direct much of the work presented.

Taken together, the fourteen tracks explain the conference's claim to promote interdisciplinary understanding. A remote-sensing scientist, a flight-software engineer, a cost analyst, and a programme manager working on the same mission can all present at the same meeting, hear each other, and read each other's papers in the same proceedings. Few specialist conferences can offer that, and few general conferences offer it at this technical depth.

History and continuity

Counting from the 44th conference in 2023, the series reaches back to about 1980. Its proceedings from the early 2000s are already recognisably in the modern form: the 2001 conference, held 10–17 March 2001 at Big Sky, Montana, produced a multi-volume proceedings published by IEEE, catalogued in libraries and cited by ISBN as well as by the series ISSN. United States government reporting on sponsored conferences in 2013 describes the meeting in terms that remain accurate: a week-long annual conference at Big Sky, organised to promote interdisciplinary understanding of aerospace systems and their applications to government and commercial endeavours, designed for aerospace experts, academics, military personnel, and industry leaders, with NASA among the agencies whose staff attend in significant numbers.

Continuity of place and format should not be mistaken for stasis of content. The programme's centre of gravity has moved with the field: commercial spaceflight, small satellites, autonomous systems, machine intelligence in flight and ground systems, and new launch architectures all appear in modern programmes in a way they could not have in 2001, while the enduring tracks — antennas, communications, spacecraft systems, operations, and systems engineering — persist because the underlying problems persist. The proceedings series, read across years, is therefore a useful longitudinal record of American and international aerospace practice, not only a set of isolated papers.

The paper process: from abstract to proceedings

The 2023 call for papers gives the canonical timetable, and later years follow the same shape with dates moved to suit the calendar. An abstract of about 300 to 500 words is due at the start of July in the year before the conference — 1 July 2022 for the March 2023 meeting. A full paper of 6 to 20 pages is then due in mid-October, reviewed papers are returned to authors in mid-November, and the final paper is due in mid-January, with registration opening the previous October and all submissions made electronically through the conference site, aeroconf.org. Authors should treat those as the typical months and check the current call for the exact dates of the year in which they plan to submit, because the specific days change annually.

Several features of that process deserve emphasis. First, the abstract is a genuine gate: the programme is built from accepted abstracts, so a vague or over-claimed abstract wastes the one annual opportunity. Second, the page range — six pages at the shortest, twenty at the longest — permits real systems papers: architecture diagrams, test results, budgets, schedules, and lessons learned can be shown rather than merely asserted. Third, review is real and timed: papers are returned with reviews in November and a final version is required in January, leaving no room for an author to treat the October submission as a draft that can be replaced at leisure. Fourth, presentation matters. Current author guidance specifies a talk of about eighteen minutes followed by questions, advises roughly ten to twelve charts that are not overly complex or crowded, recommends a structure of problem, solution, advantages and disadvantages, applications, recommendations, and summary, and requires presenters to bring their presentation on their own laptop and on a memory stick, in widescreen format. Papers whose authors do not register and present under the conference's rules may not be published.

The Junior Engineering and Science Conference

A distinctive and long-running feature is the Junior Engineering and Science Conference, described by the organisers as a unique feature of the Aerospace Conference for more than three decades. It offers students in grades 1 through 12 a friendly platform to present their own research before an audience of peers and of professional engineers and scientists. Juniors register as the guest of a main-conference registrant, submit an abstract through that registrant's portal, and present on a designated day during the conference week, with enrolment limited — in the 2027 cycle described on the conference site, to the first 25 registrants whose abstracts are accepted. Abstracts are approved in order received rather than competitively judged, in keeping with the programme's encouraging purpose, and junior presenters receive an electronic copy of the junior proceedings.

The junior programme is worth recording in a profile of the proceedings for two reasons. It shows that the conference understands itself as a community institution, not only a publication channel, investing in the next generation of aerospace engineers in the same week in which it publishes the current generation's work. And it prevents a bibliographic confusion: junior conference material is a separate, educational programme and should not be cited as if it were part of the peer-reviewed technical proceedings under ISSN 1095-323X.

Indexing, distribution, and metrics

Proceedings papers are distributed by IEEE and are available through IEEE Xplore, where they are cited by paper title, conference name and year, and DOI. The series is tracked by SCImago and other bibliometric services as a proceedings serial, which is the source of the indicators carried on the Journals World record: an h-index of 81 and an SJR of about 0.452 in that snapshot, with subject assignment to earth and planetary sciences and to engineering. Conference-level ranking services also list AeroConf prominently in mechanical and aerospace engineering, reflecting the volume and citation of its papers in that community.

Authors and evaluators should use those numbers carefully. A proceedings h-index accumulates over a long series and a large paper count, so it is not comparable with the h-index of a small annual journal. Conference papers also have a different citation life from journal articles: a mission design paper may be cited intensively while a mission is being proposed and built, and a lessons-learned paper may be cited for decades. The most meaningful checks for a specific paper remain the ordinary ones — was it presented in its track, is it in IEEE Xplore with a DOI, and is it cited by the later work in its area — rather than any single serial-level indicator. Conference fees, acceptance rates for a given year, and registration prices are not stated as permanent facts in this profile, because they change annually and any figure not taken from the current year's official call could not be verified as current; readers should consult aeroconf.org for the year in question.

How to cite and how to find papers

Cite a proceedings paper by its authors, its exact paper title, the conference name with its year, the pages or article number given in IEEE Xplore, and its DOI. Do not cite the series ISSN as if it were a DOI, and do not shorten the conference name so far that it becomes ambiguous with other IEEE aerospace meetings — IEEE also sponsors radar, avionics, and aerospace systems meetings whose proceedings are distinct serials. When searching, the combination of author, distinctive title phrase, and conference year in IEEE Xplore or in the DBLP-style bibliographic listings for aerospace venues is more reliable than a search on the series title alone, which returns many years at once.

Conclusion

The IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings, ISSN 1095-323X, is the archival record of one of the aerospace field's most distinctive annual gatherings: a week in early March at Big Sky, Montana, where mission scientists, systems engineers, operators, managers, and policy makers present peer-reviewed papers across fourteen tracks, from antennas and remote sensing to flight software, health management, operations, and cost. Published by IEEE, technically co-sponsored in recent years by AIAA and the PHM Society, and indexed as a long-running proceedings series with substantial accumulated citations, it repays being understood on its own terms — as a conference first and a publication second. For an author with a complete aerospace system, a tested technology, or a hard-won lesson to report, its abstract-to-final-paper cycle and its room full of the people who will build on the work remain, after more than four decades, a compelling reason to write the paper and make the trip.