Enrico Canuto taught Automatic Control for more than 40 years at Politecnico di Torino, Italy. He developed and applied the embedded model control methodology for the design and implementation of digital control systems. Over the course of his career, he has contributed to data reduction of the European astrometric mission Hipparcos, concluding with the publication of the Hipparcos star Catalogue of 120,000 stars; to the European GOCE mission and other forthcoming missions; to instruments for space qualification like the Nanobalance thrust-stand. In the last ten years, he has also collaborated with the Center for Gravity Experiments, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, and the Tianqin Centre, Sun-Yat-Sen University, Zhuhai, China, in the field of scientific space missions aimed at detecting gravitational waves.