• Question: how does your job affect other peoples lives

    Asked by 655rbte23 to Abbie, Melanie, Paul, Stu, Tom on 7 Mar 2016. This question was also asked by Isha.
    • Photo: Abbie Hutty

      Abbie Hutty answered on 7 Mar 2016:

      I’ve worked on satellites that affect people’s lives directly, like give us sky TV, and secure communications so that troops on deployment can phone their families back home. I’ve worked on missions that are a bit harder to see the direct impact, but that help us direct and make decisions down here on Earth, like ones that monitor the Earth and send back images after disasters to help emergency services save lives when there’s an earthquake or hurricane or Tsunami. On the same kind of level I’ve also worked on missions monitoring climate change, so that we can shape policy about how best to manage the planet for the future. And then my current mission is quite far detached from most people’s daily life – I’m working on a mission that might be the first to find out if there’s life on other planets or not. It might not change how we live in the short term but it’s one of those basic questions that deep down we always come back to when we think about the Universe.

    • Photo: Stuart Inglis

      Stuart Inglis answered on 7 Mar 2016:

      My robots fix problems and install new equipment to try and keep the oil flowing for our society. Although there’s a shift towards renewable technology, we are still heavily dependent on oil and will be for some time. My robot can install underwater renewable equipment too!

    • Photo: Paul Webb

      Paul Webb answered on 8 Mar 2016:

      If you mean in general I feed you 😉

      If you eat bread / garlic bread / crumpets / scones / pancakes or welshcakes you probly ate food from machines I worked on

      If you mean directly then I train support people around me, joke with them lol

      I hope I make everyone’s life a little better in both cases

    • Photo: Melanie Zimmer

      Melanie Zimmer answered on 16 Mar 2016:

      I hope my job and research will affect every day tasks for people in manufacturing, more specifically a production plant. If we take a car manufacturing plant as an example, then you can imagine that you have a lot of heavy parts that need to be moved around in order to be put together to a car. Robots help the workers to load and unload these parts. Also, many of these tasks are quite dangerous, noisy and dusty. Robots can facilitate these tasks as well. I hope that my software will help achieving that. 🙂

      In general all the work we engineers do is to help people in the end – help them do their jobs, help them to find out more about our world… which is the best motivation for me! 🙂

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