Profile

I live in Oxford with my girlfriend. I’m a big fan of sport of any kind really – but play golf, badminton, football and cricket. I’m also keen on board games and I’ve watched a fair amount of Netflix.

I help build science instruments for space missions and help interpret the measurements they make. I’ve been part of a team that sent instruments to Mars, the Moon, Asteroid Bennu and I am in the near future hoping to send instruments to the Moon (again) and to a comet!

Normally I get in around 9am, do a quick check that everything is OK in the lab – make sure nothing’s blown up overnight! Then around 10am i’ll head to my office and work on some project for the day – that’s often quite varied, sometimes it’s modelling the Moon on my laptop, or sometimes it’s down in the lab testing a piece of equipment. For example, when I was helping to build part of a recent Mars mission called the InSight lander, I was checking that the instrument we were building would work at the temperatures expected on Mars – so between -70 C and +30 C. But it also had to get to Mars, so I was also checking it would survive the vibration it would experience on the rocket and the cold temperatures of space and the radiation environment of space. I also had to deliver the instrument we were building to CNES (that’s the French space agency – a bit like NASA is in the USA but for France) so they were a lot of trips back and forth to France.

We 3D printed a 1 meter Moon globe to take to outreach events with us. We used real topography data measured by spacecraft that are currently in orbit around the Moon. It was quite a fun exercise to do – in fact, anyone can do it, there are shapefiles online you can just download if you want to make one… I was thinking it would be fun to make an Earth for scale.. how big would that be? Roughly 4 times larger – so 4 meters in diameter… oh that’s getting quite large – it might not fit in my car! – So maybe I’ll make Mars instead.