• Question: What is your most memorable experience whilst being a scientist?

    Asked by FreyaM on 17 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Tris Warren

      Tris Warren answered on 17 Nov 2020: last edited 17 Nov 2020 12:34 am

      Seeing a rocket launch (with stuff I’ve helped build onboard)! I’ve been lucky enough to see two now – one from a beach in Florida near the space centre – that was awesome. I can also remember the first time I handled Moon rock from the Apollo missions in our lab. Thats was both exciting and scary – since there is only a limited amount of Moon rock it is basically priceless.

    • Photo: Harriet Gamble

      Harriet Gamble answered on 17 Nov 2020:

      Like Tris, seeing the first satellite I had worked on launch and getting to see the images it was sending back was amazing, but I think the most memorable was probably the first meeting I went to with the European Space Agency. I was only talking in a small part of the meeting but that feeling of being in a room with lots of people from all over Europe who have spent their lives working on satellites and space exploration really made me realise that I was actually part of that group now, which was a big dream of mine 🙂

    • Photo: Steve Williams

      Steve Williams answered on 18 Nov 2020:

      I wrote the software that would take a video just after the satellite had separated from the rocket. It was truly fantastic when the video started to download to the ground station and we could see both the final stage of the rocket and then as the satellite gently turned to the earth below. Spectacular.

    • Photo: John Davies

      John Davies answered on 18 Nov 2020:

      Tricky because in a whole career I’ve had quite a few personal highlights, so lets pick the first. In 1983 I was working on the IRAS astronomy satellite and I found what looked like a moving object in the data.I sent an alert but the first response from a follow-up telescope was ‘nothing there’. I went home for the weekend pretty fed-up and close to quitting my job. When I got back after the weekend I had a telex (a cross between a telegram and an e-mail) saying my mystery object was a comet that would pass very close to the Earth in a weeks time. That same afternoon I was recording for the ITV 6 o’clock news. From zero to hero in a couple of hours, it was great! BTW the comet was called IRAS-Araki-Alcock if you want to look it up.

    • Photo: Zaria Serfontein

      Zaria Serfontein answered on 18 Nov 2020:

      Any of the competitions days I’ve taken part in! While I was at University, I took part in several competitions to build race cars, rovers, satellites, etc. My most memorable experiences was showing up at on the competition days and testing our designs against other designs. It was great to see our designs come to life and to be able to share these moments with my teammates.

    • Photo: Abbie Hutty

      Abbie Hutty answered on 23 Nov 2020:

      I think mine has to be from my placement year. It was a very friendly company and a group of my colleagues and I went on a surfing trip to Wales together. One evening we were sat around a campfire having a singalong with guitars and things and a couple of the people just lay back on the sand and started pointing out satellites going overhead, looking like shooting stars. I didn’t even know til then that you could actually see satellites up in space! Then someone got out an app that told you exactly WHICH satellites each one was, so then we were all lying on the sand, watching these little twinkling “shooting stars” with people piping up “I built the propulsion on that one”, or “I put together the solar panels on that one”, or “that’s got my radar instrument on it”. To suddenly realise that I was part of a group of people doing such incredible things was amazing and also humbling!

Comments

  • Photo: FreyaM

    FreyaM commented on :

    Wow! All of your experiences sound amazing! I would love to watch a rocket or satellite be launched! I can’t believe you detected a comet, how long have you been a scientist for? I would have been so proud of myself if I wrote a software like that! I love taking part in competitions too, I have entered lots whilst being at school. most the ones that I have won have been to do with drawing though. I really like science. it is my favourite subject at school!