Profile

I’m half French, but came back to the UK for university and have stayed since then. I’m married with 2 kids, the second is just 7 months old!
I’m a bit of a geek, I love reading (science fiction and fantasy), travelling, dressing up, musicals, going out, games, baking.

There are 2 aspects to my current job: designing how the satellite/rover works normally and then designing what happens if things go wrong.
I’ve mainly worked on ExoMars Rover (EXM – we use a lot of acronyms, you get used to them!), which is the European Space Agency (ESA) mission whose aim is to search for life on Mars, and I’m now working on Sample Fetch Rover (SFR) which is supposed to go pick up the samples packaged up by Perseverance.
To design the operations, you need to know a bit about every subsystem on your satellite/rover and how they interact, and you need to think about what you want it to do (seems obvious, but it’s hard!). For example, the egress operations for EXM involve switching on the Rover, deploying wheels, setting up communications, releasing the umbilical, getting down the ramp. You need to be able to send the commands and receive data back which tells you how everything’s going, but you have a small bandwidth and hours of delay, so how do you plan things so it doesn’t take days?
To define what happens if something goes wrong I need to answer questions like: how do we know there’s a failure? How can we see it? How do we figure out what caused it? How severe is it? Can we reset the unit, switch it off, is it impacting the payload, do we need to stop everything and let Ground investigate?

Not many more details than that really! Projects are divided into phases. If I’m working on an early phase of a project then we’re looking at defining the requirements and early design work. ESA (is generally the customer on the projects I work on) will send us a requirement document for what they want the mission to be able to do, it’s quite top-level and we need to make those requirements more and more precise to define all the way down to unit level what we want. We also need to think about how we test things, because space is such a harsh environment, and getting there as well, we need to spend a lot of time testing to make sure we can meet the requirements.
If I’m working on a later phase of the project then we might be reviewing software, test reports, defining the user manual… Later on we’d be planning the launch phase and testing for that, and eventually supporting the launch! (I haven’t done that yet, it’s something I’d love to do)

I have to admit, I haven’t thought of something yet! I mainly thought this would be something cool to take part in. I’d like to support girls in choosing STEM careers, but I don’t have a practical idea yet.