Manuel Martín-Neira received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in telecommunication engineering in 1986 and 1996 respectively from the School of Telecommunication Engineering, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain. In 1988, he was awarded a fellowship to work on microwave radiometry at ESA (European Space Agency), in The Netherlands. From 1989 to 1992 he joined GMV, a Spanish firm, as responsible for several projects on GPS spacecraft precise navigation and attitude determination. Since 1992, with ESA, in charge of the radiometer activities within the Payload, Equipment and Technology Section. In 2010 he became remote sensing senior engineer in the Payload Systems Division.
He has developed new concepts for constellations of small satellites for Earth Observation. In particular, he holds several patents related to aperture synthesis radiometry, on the use of GNSS signals reflected from the ocean (PARIS concept) and in frequency distribution. He received the Confirmed Inventor Award from ESA in 2002, the Salva i Campillo Award and the Premio Jaime I in New Techologies in 2010 from Spain and a Certificate of Recognition for the SMOS mission in 2011 from IEEE. He is member of the Academie des Technologies of France and IEEE Fellow.
Since 1992 involved in aperture synthesis for remote sensing. In 2001 he became the Instrument Principal Engineer of ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, fully operational still today (January 2025), which he continues to support within the calibration and image processing team. In 1993 he proposed the use of GNSS reflected signals for Earth Observation, and since then, he has been working in GNSS reflectometry studies and missions like the PARIS In-orbit Demonstration mission, the GEROS-ISS experiment on the International Space Station, the PRETTY GNSS-R cubesat and the GNSS-R Spire Global satellites. He is instrument engineer in the HydroGNSS project team.
In other field, he has proposed a system to perform Space-to-Space Very Long Baseline Interferometry (S2S-VLBI) from Medium Earth Orbit to sharply image the event horizon of Super Massive Black Holes like Sagittarius A* or M87, as well as a demonstration experiment of S2S-VLBI using the Hydron system.