• Question: What is going to be your main project for the future?

    Asked by Hagrid to Mike, Camilla, Dan, Katie, Rhys on 17 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by 679spcc32, TCardinal, ronan and Eden.
    • Photo: Camilla Weiss

      Camilla Weiss answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      Over the next few months I will be working on commissioning three of our satellites which are due to launch in July. Commissioning is the stage just after the satellite has launched where we perform lots of health checks on the satellite and make sure it is in the correct orbit and working properly before we hand it over to our customer. This usually takes about 6 weeks but because we have 3 satellites to do at once it will take a bit longer. The satellites are imaging satellites and our most powerful ones yet – they will have a resolution of 1 meter, which means they can pick out something as small as 1 meter on the ground from their orbit 650km up! Once we have commissioned the satellites they should run reasonably well by themselves – we just need to send occasional instructions about where to take pictures.

    • Photo: Katie Sparks

      Katie Sparks answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      I really don’t know!
      At the moment, I am working on Lisa Pathfinder, until that launches later this year. I am also working on PLATO, but the phase we are in finishes in February. If we win the PLATO work, that will start in October 2016 and take around 10 years – but what I do between February and October, I don’t know! I also don’t know what I’ll be doing if we don’t win it and I might not support PLATO – I could be involved in something else, there are lots of things going on all the time.

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