Celebrating the successful launch and solar panel deployment of JUICE as it starts its 8 year journey to the Jovian system. I helped build that!

With Kraken rum and Death in Paradise. :) The celebration, not the build.

Today was much better than yesterday. ( Pre-schooler TMI )

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Background information: I work in one of the groups that's a Principal Investigator (PI) institute for the JUICE mission. This L-class (where L stands for "Large") spacecraft has a launch date of 2022, and will travel to Jupiter to study the Jovian system. The spacecraft will be the first ever to orbit one of the Galilean moons. The chosen target ( Read more... )

One of our hardware CoIs (co-investigators) on the JUICE mission is a group in Graz, Austria who have been working long and hard on a new type of laser-based magnetometer sensor. The flight model was delivered more than a year ago now to be mounted on the Chinese satellite Zhangheng-1 (ZH-1) - also known as the China Seismo-Electromagnetic ( Read more... )

Hear ye, hear ye: on the evening of Tuesday 10 October, you can come to Imperial College London and meet some Cassini scientists and engineers. Well, OK, one engineer (that would be me). Imperial are hosting a Fringe event titled “A Space Odyssey” in celebration of the Cassini end of mission, and there are lots of things to see, including me ( Read more... )

First, I received my Cassini Grand Finale stickers from the delightful
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Hello, I'm not so good at posting this week, due to it having been a bank holiday weekend which was also possibly the last gasp of summer, the bloke returning home from Nairobi and us turning around immediately afterward to go camping in Devon, and then back to drowning in work. We actually have some hardware in our hot little hands for the ( Read more... )

I've had a heck of a week. Keiki was off nursery Tuesday and Wednesday. I looked after him on Tuesday. I flew from Birmingham to Noordwijk on Wednesday and the bloke looked after Keiki. I was at an all-day meeting on Thursday at ESTEC (ESA centre in the Netherlands). I flew to London on Thursday night. This morning (Friday) I went to a four-hour ( Read more... )