nanila | Entries tagged with science

Four Imperial College physicists were awarded medals by the Institute of Physics recently. You can read about it in full here. Below are the quotes from the prize winners. The emphasis is mine.

Prof Dougherty, winner of the Richard Glazebrook Medal and Prize, also my Big Boss: "It is a great privilege to be given this award for essentially doing my job, none of which would have been possible without the great people I have worked with over the years."

Prof Sutton, winner of the David Tabor Medal and Prize: "I am delighted to receive the Tabor medal and prize from the IOP. David Tabor was a giant in the physics of surfaces and interfaces and it is a great honour for me to receive this award."

Prof Stevens, winner of the Rosalind Franklin Medal and Prize: "This award recognises the hard work of my fantastic team of postdocs and students and the terrific contributions that they have made to new platforms of designer materials for biomedical applications."

Dr Wade, winner of the Daphne Jackson Medal and Prize: "This isn’t really a prize for me, but a prize for Imperial - I’ve grown up at Imperial, fallen in love with physics at Imperial and realised the importance of sharing my enthusiasm with others at Imperial.

"I have been privileged to be involved with Imperial’s public engagement activities both on and off campus - the incredible festival, the schools workshops and the awesome work of Priya and the White City team - and can safely say they’ve inspired me to keep speaking about science even when I’m outside the lab."

Three women. One man. No prizes for guessing which one of these statements came from the dude.

If anyone wants to sit with me and my sardonic expression, quietly being disappointed but not surprised, you're most welcome.

with a hint of combichrist - this sh*t will f*ck you up
Crossposts: https://nanila.livejournal.com/1201291.html

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Picture of a metal box with frames for PCBs (printed circuit boards).

I realise this may not be the most thrilling photo ever, but I'm not ashamed to say that I almost cried when I saw this metal box. This box represents 18 months' worth of work on my part (and others', but a lot of it was on me to coordinate) to get A Certain Space Agency to approve our soldering qualification plan for our flight electronics for the JUICE mission. The existence of this box means that we have been allowed to manufacture actual physical hardware rather than just endlessly iterating on bits of paperwork describing the hardware. It's not just spreadsheets and Word documents any more! There is a METAL BOX, and we will Put Things Into It, and heat them up and freeze them repeatedly, and shake the box around violently to ensure that bits don't fall off of it.

I may shed tears when the PCBs arrive and we can put them into the frames.

METAL BOOOOOX \m/

the weather today is wibbly
with a hint of and one - metalhammer
Crossposts: https://nanila.livejournal.com/1187455.html

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I went to a girls' school today to talk to 50 Year 6 students (aged 10-11) about the Cassini mission and the work I do. To say "it went well" would be an understatement. I talked for about 30 minutes and then spent the next 40 minutes answering their questions. They would have kept me longer, but their teacher insisted they go to their last lesson of the day. A group of them also asked me to sign some of the lithographs of Saturn that I'd brought to give them.

This was all pretty brilliant on its own, but then their teacher told me the following story. I had previously visited in November of last year to give a similar talk to the Year 5 students at this school. One of the girls in the class had, up until my visit, been adamant for a couple of years that she was going to be a hairdresser. After my visit, however, she had gone home and told her mother, "Mummy, I've changed my mind. I'm not going to be a hairdresser."

"Oh?" replied her mother. "What are you going to be now?"

"I'm going to be a space scientist. Or an engineer."

Five months later, she has not changed her mind. She's now one of the top-performing students in her science classes.

I know this girl is very young. I know she may as yet change her mind again. But if bringing to life the possibility of becoming a scientist or engineer to one girl, for whom that was a remote possibility at best, were literally the only effect my outreach efforts had ever had on any of the hundreds of students I've visited in the last twelve years*, it would be worth it.

* I'm fairly sure it's not.

the weather today is happy
Crossposts: https://nanila.livejournal.com/1167188.html

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Who made you feel good this week, and how?
My line manager made me feel appreciated and valued. An ex-colleague made specific plans to hang out with me twice in the next five weeks and that made me feel good about people wanting to spend time with me even though I’m always tired.
What did you do this week that moved you closer to reaching your goals?
Arranged a meeting with my Big Boss. Well, I don’t know if the meeting will actually move me closer to my goals, but the act of setting aside a specific time to talk about it was a step I’d been putting off for ages.
What did you most enjoy doing this week?
Calibrating Cluster magnetometer data.
What did you learn this week?
I learnt that there are a lot of ways to arrange the wires and pads in a flip-and-wire mounting of a SMD (surface mount device) on a PCB (printed circuit board), and that they are all ugly. Some are more compact than others, but there is never going to be anything pretty about big blobs of Scotchweld.

Hey, you asked.
What’s the funniest thing that happened to you this week?
[Bodily function TMI alert] Keiki pooped himself whilst he was asleep. He came downstairs for his breakfast, and Humuhumu and I went, “Phwoar, Keiki!” Then the three of us spontaneously burst into a rendition of Keiki’s classic song Poo in the Night.

Parenting: so awesome

the weather today is happy mother's day
Crossposts: https://nanila.livejournal.com/1164297.html

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The Parker Solar Probe is due to launch this year, between July and August 2018. If you want to hitch a ride to the Sun with it, well, you can't. But your name can! A memory card with names on it will be carried on the spacecraft as it explores the Sun's atmosphere in a series of brutally boiling perihelion passes. Scorchio.

Sign up here by 27 April 2018, and you will receive a pretty digital certificate that you can save to PDF and/or print out.

the weather today is scorchio
coordinates work
Crossposts: https://nanila.livejournal.com/1163360.html

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Background information: I work in one of the groups that's a Principal Investigator (PI) institute for the JUICE mission. This L-class (where L stands for "Large") spacecraft has a launch date of 2022, and will travel to Jupiter to study the Jovian system. The spacecraft will be the first ever to orbit one of the Galilean moons. The chosen target is Ganymede, as it has both a subsurface ocean, like Europa, and its own intrinsic magnetic field. It is the only non-planetary body in the solar system known to produce a permanent magnetic field.

Our institute is providing most of the hardware for one of the scientific instruments on board the JUICE spacecraft. We are building most of the electronics and one of the sensors. We also have two hardware-providing Co-Investigators (Co-Is), one in Germany and one in Austria. Our German colleagues have been producing similar sensors to us for about the same number of decades, and their design, like ours, has a great deal of space heritage.

Our Austrian Co-Is, on the other hand, had none.

Until last Saturday.

Their sensor went into orbit around the Earth on a Chinese spacecraft last month. I wrote about it here. The boom on which the sensor was mounted was successfully deployed and the instrument was switched on into test mode.

Last Saturday, the sensor went into Science mode for the first time and measured the Earth's magnetic field. I reproduce Andreas' tweet on the subject below:

18550,6 nT. Today for the first time ever, a Coupled Dark State Magnetometer measured the magnetic field in space. The result of 11 years of development by @iwf_graz/@oeaw and the Institute of Experimental Physics.

Why does this matter so much to us? Because this sensor forms part of our JUICE instrument as well. We are extremely pleased that it works!

the weather today is sleepy
Crossposts: https://nanila.livejournal.com/1163055.html

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One of our hardware CoIs (co-investigators) on the JUICE mission is a group in Graz, Austria who have been working long and hard on a new type of laser-based magnetometer sensor. The flight model was delivered more than a year ago now to be mounted on the Chinese satellite Zhangheng-1 (ZH-1) – also known as the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES).

Today, they got to celebrate a successful launch on a Long March 2D rocket from Inner Mongolia. Apparently it was -15 degrees C at the launch site.

They are naturally very excited about this, but also still nervous, because the boom with their sensor on it won't be deployed until Monday. Nevertheless! Successful launch! Given that it is a single-point-failure that can never be mitigated away, this is always cause for celebration.

You can read more about CSES, and the six CubeSat-based satellites that launched with it, here.

the weather today is jubilant
with a hint of grimes - venus fly ft janelle monae
Crossposts: https://nanila.livejournal.com/1154786.html

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Poll #19345 The Moons of Jupiter

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43

View Respondents

My favourite Galilean moon of Jupiter is

View Answers

Io
13 (30.2%)

Europa
15 (34.9%)

Ganymede
7 (16.3%)

Callisto
8 (18.6%)

Because?

View Answers

I am sad that the moon question was not ticky.

View Answers

Yes.
26 (66.7%)

No.
16 (41.0%)

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1) Very happy John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme (series 7) is on Radio 4. I'm pretty sure you can listen from anywhere from BBC radio iPlayer.

2) Excited about watching Fighting for Air on BBC Two. Bloke is on towards the end talking particulate results.

3) I'm drinking raspberry beer.

the weather today is Content
Crossposts: https://nanila.livejournal.com/1148722.html

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project,
project: 365 posts,
radio,
radio: john finnemore souvenir programme,
science,
television,
work

If anyone wants to learn more about the kind of science my other half does*, you can see him in a programme next Wednesday 10 January on BBC Two at 9 PM. It's called Fighting for Air and is presented by Dr Xand van Tulleken. (NB Dr Xand is not the bloke. The bloke did, however, set up the experiment featured in the programme.)

Programme description: Imagine if you could change the quality of the air we breathe - in just one day. Air pollution in the UK has been declared a 'public health emergency' and Dr Xand van Tulleken is seeing what can be done about it. Enlisting the help of enthusiasts and sceptics from the Kings Heath community in Birmingham, Xand stages the first ever large-scale experiment of its kind - using people power to try and bring about a quantifiable improvement in air quality for a single day.

I would also like to take this opportunity to state that our personal vehicle does not run on diesel. After viewing the programme, you'll see why I've made this point!

* Our PhDs were very similar. We are now both rather differently employed.

the weather today is cars: why must we
with a hint of Alan Walker - Faded
Crossposts: https://nanila.livejournal.com/1147181.html

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Sauntering Vaguely Downward

Into the land of lowered expectations

Day 192/365: Hashtag Not All Men

Day 151/365: Actual JUICE mission hardware!

Day 79/365: Cassini Outreach

Day 70/365: The Friday Five on a Sunday

Day 66/365: Send your name to be SIZZLED BY THE SUN

Day 65/365: Scientific Progress...Makes Graphs?

Day 33/365: Successful launch!

Day 19/365: Friday's Unscientific Poll: The Moons of Jupiter

Day 10/365: Three things make a post

Day 4/365: Bloke on telly

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