Profile

I live with my husband and 2 sons aged 5 and 7 in Wimbledon.  I’m an engineer because I like working out how things work and solving problems.

I also like modern calligraphy and gardening.

Following an Engineering Degree at Trinity College, Cambridge, I spent 4 years drilling oil wells in various locations from the North Sea to Oman and Venezuela. I started at Imperial College’s Space Magnetometer Lab in 2003 working on the magnetometer (an instrument to measure the magnetic field) for a joint European Space Agency/Chinese Mission called Double Star.  Following the launch and end of this mission, I moved into more detailed instrument design work, still with magnetometers, but now trying to make our instruments smaller and more compact, which is really important for space missions.   I have worked on the magnetometer for the Bepi Colombo mission to Mercury (due to launch this year) and am the Instrument Manager for the magnetometer on Solar Orbiter – a mission I have worked on since 2007, and which is due to launch from Cape Canaveral in February 2020.

There are lots of ingredients to a good space instrument.  It is my job to make sure we have all the right ingredients at the right time.  This means, a good, well tested design and a clear understanding of how our design will work with the spacecraft.

Most of space is a vacuum, which means it is almost empty.   But it is not completely empty.  There are a few particles around, and if you know which way the magnetic field is pointing, you can work out how these particles are behaving.  That is where our instrument comes in. It tells us the strength and direction of the magnetic field, where the spacecraft is. Our solar system is made up of the extended atmosphere of the sun, and the sun is constantly changing – it has moods and explosions. We can tell what kind of mood the sun is in by studying its magnetic field. But the sun’s field out is space is quite small, and it is really cold, so building an instrument to do the job is hard.

So my day to day job is trying to make sure we keep with the allowed mass and power budget that we have, check we will survive the launch and difficult environment in space, make sure we can communicate effectively with the spacecraft, and be confident that the way our instrument behaves will not make it impossible for other instrument or spacecraft systems to work.

There are lots of design challenges to overcome in building space instruments, but ultimately it is great fun working out how to overcome them.  I would like to get some lego kits that help demonstrate these challenges and take them into schools so the children can find out for themselves why engineering is so much fun.