Staff who are the real stars
Can anyone name Christopher Columbus' ship-builder? I'm sure someone in Oxford will be able to but I know I can't. History, it seems, only remembers the people who successfully exploit the technology of their day, not those that developed it. Beneath each famous figure sits a vast team of people who, between them, made history happen and it's the same today.In my building at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, I work alongside people who have designed and built spacecraft that are busy exploring our solar-system. These ordinary looking folks, with calm and understated expertise, are travelling to frontiers so distant that Columbus would probably gibber at the mere thought. Between them, they have recently helped to send probes to the Moon, Mars, Venus and Saturn. At Saturn, a probe was successfully landed on Titan (the largest of Saturn's moons, which has an Earth-like atmosphere) and sensors designed and built in the UK were the first to touch this alien world.
I spend my days boldly going into the office to view spectacular solar storms being imaged by cameras on the twin NASA STEREO spacecraft. Each of these storms contains around a billion tonnes of material travelling at a million miles an hour. We are only just beginning to understand when and why these storms occur. A highlight of the mission is the UK-built cameras on STEREO known as the Heliospheric Imagers. Mounted on the side of each spacecraft, these wide-field cameras look back at the space between the Sun and the Earth to provide early warning of any solar storms approaching our planet. Most of a storm's energy is deflected by the Earth's magnetic field and the remainder is absorbed high up in our atmosphere, generating the spectacular Northern (and Southern) Lights. While we are safe on the ground, astronauts have to shelter in a radiation-shielded section of their space-station and sensitive satellite electronics can be damaged during such a storm. Predicting this 'space weather' will be vital if we send explorers to other planets, such as the Moon and Mars, which do not have the protection of a magnetic field or a thick atmosphere.
Sitting in my virtual crow's nest, I may be amongst the first to see these distant storms brewing but I am using technology developed by many others. I sincerely hope that, with the advent of electronic media, history finds a way of remembering them all.
Dr Chris Davis from the Space Science & Technology Department at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory wrote this article.
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