Space conference

Yesterday saw the 4th Appleton Space Conference taking place at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Having crawled back to work I was able to attend, which was good because sitting completely spaced out in a lecture theatre was by far preferable to sitting completely spaced out at my desk and then feeling guilty for having done no work.

One highlight was a lecture on the geology of the moon, and of course all the wonderful science that will be done using the Chandrayaan-1 X-ray Spectrometer. Smug moment, as I designed a lot of that instrument!

Many of the other talks were about monitoring climate change. What we get shown in those sorts of lectures are often quite disturbing, such as changes to weather patterns, melting ice sheets, etc. I always come out of those lectures feeling quite angry about the kind of people who say things like "I don't believe in global warming, my mate down the pub reckons it's all a big scam to rip us off with taxes."

A free lunch always calms me down though.

Again this year we also had the head of Virgin Galactic telling us about their progress with their space tourism venture, and how the White Knight aircraft could also be used as an aerial launch platform for rockets carrying small satellites. I missed my second opportunity to ask him if, going on my experience with their trains, they plan to line the seats up with the windows in their spaceship.

UK ESA Centre

I heard confirmation today of a piece of news that I've been aware of for a while now through work, but has been looking more and more likely to happen as time has gone on.

The UK is to get an ESA facility, and that facility will be based here on the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus near Oxford.


The full story is on the BBC website here.

ESA, the European Space Agency, is Europe's answer to NASA. They currently have facilities in most major European countries, but currently the UK is the major exception. The rumours are that this new facility will specialise in climate science and space robotics, but I haven't heard anything more specific yet.

Depending on exactly what the focus of this facility will be this news may cause me to be faced with a career dilemma. Whilst my work as a mechanical engineer at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory is never boring we always seem to miss out on the really really exciting stuff, such as Mars surface rovers, or technology for manned spaceflight. With the next few decades looking pretty interesting with regards to space exploration, with manned missions to the Moon and maybe even Mars on the horizon. I would hate to find myself designing yet another spectrometer or radiometer for yet another Earth observation satellite if the people next door are getting involved with all of that.

I shall keep both of my eyes wide open to see what opportunities this new centre might offer in the way of jobs for a mechanical engineer.

Space toaster!

Today brings me good news!

I have just heard today that the Chandrayaan-1 X-ray spectrometer (C1XS - pronounced "Kicks") has been successfully activated. This instrument, for which I did a significant proportion of the the design work, is designed to produce a map of the surface composition of the lunar surface and is one of the payloads on the Indian Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft that was in the news recently. I call it the space toaster because it's the same size as a toaster and runs at about the same temperature when all the electronics are switched on.

The door, held down by a pin puller for launch, was released and opened successfully. The detectors, now pointed at the lunar surface, appear to have survived the greater than designed for radiation exposure better than we could have even hoped and are also working well.




Practically this time last year this instrument was pieces of metalwork sat on my desk. A year before that it was just images on my CAD screen. Now it's in orbit around the moon. I love this job!