Sauntering Vaguely Downward

Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:09:23 GMT

Before we left Washington DC after our brief but packed visit, my colleague and I paid a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum. We decided to walk from where we were staying, forgetting that the park around the capitol was completely blocked off for the fair. This turned what would have been a 13-minute walk in the sweltering heat into 35-minute walk in said heat. By the time we got to the museum queue, which stretched beyond the shade of the building, we were melting.

At least we had an odd aerobatics display involving parachutes and upside-down flags to entertain us while we queued.

Happy, happy nerds, who have successful achieved museum entry. And air conditioning. Blessed, blessed air conditioning.

Lunar module LM-2 feet. Gold on the outer side, black on the inner side facing the main engine exhaust. Thermal management!

Aforementioned LM-2 main engine.

LM2 from above.

Pioneer!

CubeSats.

The excellent little Sorato rover, developed by the Japanese company ispace, which sadly hasn’t flown.

IceCube neutrino observatory.

So many treasures in the space hall.

This still blows my mind. These holes are where the debris impact craters were drilled out and studied when Hubble’s original Wide Field Camera was removed and replaced, and the flawed camera returned to Earth.

Delighted colleague with Hubble’s backup mirror.

Dava Newman’s spacesuit.

The aftermath of 16 years in space.

Telstar. Fantastic little spacecraft. Most excellent cat (RIP Telly).

Epilogue: I didn’t end up replacing my SR-71 blackbird hoodie, because I thought most of the designs in the shop were rather tacky. Everything’s gone to these big screen-printed images that take up the entire front or back (or both) of the item. My old hoodie just had an attractive sewn logo on the top left side on the front. I settled for a t-shirt that had a similar printed logo on the front.

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1SE for June 2023

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 20:17:29 GMT

At last I have both remembered to post this and had the energy to do it!

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JUICE is on its way

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 21:54:45 GMT

Celebrating the successful launch and solar panel deployment of JUICE as it starts its 8 year journey to the Jovian system. I helped build that!

With Kraken rum and Death in Paradise. :) The celebration, not the build.

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The Friday Five on a Sunday + LEGO Space shuttle

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 08:18:54 GMT

1) Do you like to drive?
In a word, no. I do it because I have to. There are very specific circumstances under which it is enjoyable to drive, and they almost never exist in the UK. I have one memory of fun driving here, after dropping my parents off at Heathrow, on a warm sunny morning. The M40 was virtually deserted and I bombed home to Worcestershire in under two hours.

2) Do you own (or have regular use of) a car? What kind is it?
I do. It's VW Golf. It is by far the most fun car to drive that I've ever owned.

3) What is your favourite optional feature on a car?
To be honest, getting this car was such a massive step up from the previous one, everything about it felt like a gift: the bluetooth connection to devices, the built-in satnav, the power windows, the acceleration, the friendly clutch, all of it. But probably the most delightful unnecessary feature of it is the sunroof.

4) How much does ~~gasoline~~ petrol currently cost where you live?
It's about £1.26 per litre. There are 4.55 litres in a gallon. So it costs £5.73, or US$7.85, per gallon. I've been in the UK for almost 17 years now and I'm still shocked by that.

5) What is the longest car trip you have taken?
I think it's still the one where my parents and I drove across the USA the summer before my ninth birthday. We started in Seattle and the furthest East we went was to visit family in Pennsylvania.

And finally, LOOK at what my fantastically thoughtful and generous friend Josh sent me for a super-early birthday present!! Building this is going to be my reward when Semester 2 teaching finishes in a few weeks.

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An awesome end to a nerve-wracking week

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 16:48:18 GMT

Yesterday was the 14th anniversary of me working on the European Space Agency's Cluster mission.

Today, I received news that one of my Year 1 Aero students, whom I helped with her application, has been accepted onto ESA's prestigious Fly A Rocket! programme.

That is just about the best anniversary gift I could have received.

Have a photo of an extremely tired me in my headphones, preparing to record a lecture, wearing my Cluster hoodie that was gifted to me by my magnetometer lab colleagues. All that blurry stuff is the cracking around my phone's front camera. I need to replace my phone. There is no time to shop for a new phone. *thud*

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Day 8/183: Mechanical Drawings from Ye Olden Times

Thu, 16 Jan 2020 22:17:36 GMT

I dug out this mechanical drawing of one of the Cluster spacecraft the other day, because I needed to know how long the deployed magnetometer boom is. The reason is not so important. Things that are important:

The drawing has been taken in and out of the folder so many times that the inner set of holes has been destroyed.
Holy tatty edges, Batman.
The version of the document it's part of was issued in June 1993. That's over 26 years ago.
Printing stuff in A3 is so good for detail in drawings.
How is it that my old work colleague, Patrick, never spilled his tea on this? Truly a mystery for the ages.

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Slowly rotating Titan (Day 20 of 30)

Sun, 22 Sep 2019 20:05:24 GMT

Today was my birthday, and amongst the many lovely gifts I received (favourite perfume! bubble bath! whisky!) was Slowly Rotating Titan, moon of Saturn, which has come from My Friend Josh to join Slowly Rotating Jupiter (DW/LJ).

19 second YouTube video of rotating Titan on a windowsill. Very soothing, especially with the sound off, because otherwise you can faintly hear Keiki playing Minecraft in the background.

Now it is time to snuggle up with my new book (Mudlarking) and maybe a wee dram, and finish digesting the amazing roast dinner the bloke made.

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Day 261/365: Slowly rotating Jupiter makes everything better.

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 20:59:41 GMT

Today was much better than yesterday. ( Pre-schooler TMI ) But that is not the only reason it was better, for today, the first birthday card arrived for me, from my aunt-out-law in the USA, and also a Mystery Amazon Package, which turned out to contain this:

[Still life of Slowly Rotating solar-powered Jupiter sitting on its stand.]

If you would like to see Slowly Rotating Jupiter rotating, click below.

[YouTube video, 45 sec, of Slowly Rotating Jupiter rotating.]

It has been gifted to me by My Mate Josh, who is an awesome and faithful friend and has been for over twenty years. He also reads this journal. Thank you, Josh! <3

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Day 255/365: Another day in London, another tranche of Ancient Space Hardware

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 17:59:58 GMT

Today my boss ambled in and dropped another load of Space History on my desk. This included a bunch of photographs of Cassini flight hardware (subject of a future post), but also three photos of Ulysses hardware, which is even older.

The Ulysses spacecraft, which is still in orbit although decommissioned and not operational, remains one of the few spacecraft to leave the ecliptic plane of the solar system to a significant degree. It studied the poles of the Sun. It launched in 1990, and the total mission duration was over eighteen years.

We estimate these photos are from the early 1980s. They're of the flight hardware for the magnetometer, which now drifts quietly with the rest of the silent spacecraft, between Jupiter and the Sun.

[Ulysses magnetometer sensor head]

[Ulysses magnetometer electronics box]

[Topside view of one of the Ulysses magnetometer flight boards. Look at all those beautifully hand-soldered through-hole components!]

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Day 151/365: Actual JUICE mission hardware!

Thu, 31 May 2018 20:49:13 GMT

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/

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

Wed, 07 Mar 2018 19:35:24 GMT

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.

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

Tue, 06 Mar 2018 21:09:27 GMT

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!

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Day 33/365: Successful launch!

Fri, 02 Feb 2018 15:44:11 GMT

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.

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Pasadena Touristic: The Huntington Library and Gardens (Part 2)

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:24:34 GMT

This post continues the homage to the Huntington Library and Gardens with a sample of the library displays. These are a mere fraction of what the library itself actually archives, although one needs a vetted research proposal in order to gain full access to its contents.

We begin with, er, light bulbs. Because if you were absurdly wealthy, why wouldn’t you amass a collection of historic lightbulbs.

“The Huntington’s collection of historical lamps consists of nearly 400 light bulbs, about half of which are on display here. The light bulbs range from the 1890s to the 1960s. They include examples of the variety of bases, filaments and globes in use before the development of current incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs.”

( More light bulbs and then some actual, y'know, books )

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Cassini End of Mission events, Part 4 of ?

Fri, 15 Sep 2017 23:17:27 GMT

emelbe and I set our alarms for 02:30 and 02:35 respectively, just to be sure we got up in time to walk over to Caltech for the end of mission. We dressed and poured coffee into ourselves, made sure we had our badges, and got out the door in plenty of time to arrive before 04:00, the official start of the event and NASA TV coverage.

Walking up to Beckman Auditorium (aka the wedding cake) from the south.

( As it happened. )

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Cassini End of Mission events, Part 3 of ?

Fri, 15 Sep 2017 19:55:21 GMT

Thursday was meant to be a quiet day, since we all knew we had to be up and at Caltech by 4 AM for the thing we’d all been preparing for: the actual end of mission.

In reality, there were some impromptu science meetings at Caltech, one of which I attended in the morning. I slipped out just before noon, because I had someone to meet.

I headed down from Beckman to South Mudd to see my former JPL postdoctoral supervisor, from back in those heady days when I was still a lab scientist, for lunch. I hadn’t seen him since 2006. I eventually remembered where his Caltech office was. I could’ve found the JPL one much more easily, but it would have required me to check in and get a badge, which seemed a lot of faff for lunch. Besides, there are nicer places to eat in Pasadena. Once in the correct corridor, I spotted his technician hovering outside the door, plus another UK person from the physical chemistry community whom I’d never met but knows the bloke pretty well. There were lots of smiles and hugs, and we decided to head down to a restaurant over on Lake Street.

We had a very pleasant hour of conversation, reminiscing and catching up. I had a shock on hearing that their children, whom I remembered as children or young teenagers, were now grown up and had careers of their own. Of course I knew that would have happened in the intervening decade-plus, but it’s not until you actually speak together about these things that they’re driven home to you. They were equally shocked on learning that Humuhumu has started school - and has a younger sibling! The bloke and I had been remiss in our communication, clearly. We talked of science, of course, and of politics and its effects on research direction, and of our worries about the future due to Brexit and the current US administration.

I am still kicking myself for forgetting to take a photo. You must instead picture me with a group of men: one starting to disappear into the frailty of old age, peering out earnestly from large-framed glasses, one solid and grey-haired and mostly silent with twinkling blue eyes, and one cheeky-grinned middle-aged bear of a chap with a shock of brown hair and a beard. All sitting together in a booth of a Japanese restaurant, eagerly shoveling the contents of bento boxes into our faces, occasionally bursting into roars of laughter while cheesy ‘90s music played in the background.

We parted with promises not to let another eleven years pass before we met again. I was left with the warm glow you get from (re)connecting with friendly, kind, intelligent people. It was a lovely way to buffer against the excitement and strain of what was to come on Friday morning.

Chilling out in my JPL t-shirt before the end of mission.

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Cassini End of Mission events, Part 2 of ?

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:05:50 GMT

On Wednesday morning, emelbe and I saddled up and drove over to the Jet Propulsion Lab for a tour. We put her trusty sat nav on, and I noticed that instead of a car, the little icon was an x-wing. She turned the audio on. “Driven well you have,” said Yoda. “In a quarter of a mile, turn left. It is your destiny.”

It was decided that it was fitting for Yoda to be allowed to direct us to JPL.

JPL tour badge with Curiosity on the front. We got to keep these.

( Tour, with side trips down memory lane )

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Cassini End of Mission events, Part 1 of ?

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 02:31:20 GMT

I flew into Los Angeles on the Sunday before the last-while-Cassini-is-still-in-orbit-around-Saturn Project Science Group meeting began. I was feeling dodgy when I got up at 6 AM, but I napped in the taxi and took some ibuprofen, and hoped that the feeling would go away.

It did not.

I made sure my usual mobile pharmacy (ibuprofen, paracetamol, Rennie) was stocked in my rucksack before I boarded the plane, and was glad I'd done so about three hours into the flight when my fever started spiking. I alternated ibuprofen and paracetamol every two hours. The flight attendants kindly granted all of my requests for cold water/cans of ginger ale, which were frequent. It was one of the most miserable long-haul flights I've ever had.

I spent nearly all of Monday in bed apart from a brief foray out to get a hot Thai curry into my belly for lunch. This paid off on Tuesday, and I was able to spend half a day at Caltech to dial into the penultimate operations meeting. (There will be one more after the crash, but obviously we’ll no longer have an instrument status to report.) I was excited about this, because I had been saving up something for a very long time.

( In fine fettle was the other option )

to be continued

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#tbt: Two more weeks of Cassini, and a momentous occasion

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 08:08:16 GMT

(I meant to post this yesterday but ran out of oomph. Er, maybe it's still Thursday somewhere?)

I realise this is not the most exciting photo in the world, but my Fun Space History Fact of the Day for Throwback Thursday is that the Cassini spacecraft distributed operations computers OS of choice is...Solaris. Note the countdown clock in the upper right corner of the screen. Only two weeks left.

Side note: I love those weird eye-bendy default backgrounds in Solaris. They remind me that my first experience learning to use *nix properly was on the Sun Sparc 5 workstations in the Von Karman library basement at the University of Southern California.

Yesterday, we celebrated the retirement of one of my lab colleagues (second from right). He spent 52 years working as a technician in our lab. Power supplies he built for dozens of space missions are scattered throughout the solar system. He is a (largely) unsung hero of space history, Hauksbee Award notwithstanding. Trevor Beek, I salute you. I hope you enjoy many years in contemplation of a job well done.

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#tbt: Two Cassini artifacts and a Message to Voyager

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 09:06:13 GMT

It is now just over three weeks until Cassini plunges into Saturn’s atmosphere and the mission (but not the Project) comes to an end. I grow a little sentimental.

This is the flight spare of Cassini’s fluxgate magnetometer sensor, which will live on. We use it for command simulations on the ground.

This is a 1:25 scale model of the Cassini spacecraft, with the Huygens probe attached to its side. It includes the magnetometer boom, which is hidden in this view. These were distributed to the payload teams. It's been in our group longer than I have (>11 years).

I recently ordered a big perspex display box for the model, so we can have it on show at the upcoming Imperial Fringe festival, post-mission-end. I’ll be giving a talk at the Farewell to Cassini exhibit. Details to follow (on the Londoners filter) when they’re confirmed and the web site for event registration is live.

This is a screenshot of NASA Eyes on the DSN that I took on 4 August. DSS-14 at Goldstone (the antenna in white on the left) is receiving data from Voyager 1 (spacecraft shown on the right). I accompanied this with “We’re still listening” on magnetometrist on Instagram.

NASA has a poll, open until Tuesday 29 August, to choose a 60-character-or-less #MessagetoVoyager, to be sent on 5 September. If you want to vote on a message, go here.

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Friday’s Unscientific Space Post

Fri, 04 Aug 2017 12:02:57 GMT

August is, apparently, the season for Certificates of Appreciation in spacecraft engineering!

First up is the one for Solar Orbiter.

This has an image of the spacecraft approaching the Sun in the upper right corner. It reads, “This certificate recognises the significant contribution of [nanila] to the development of the magnetometer instrument on the Solar Orbiter spacecraft. In recognition of this contribution, your name will be carried within the memory of the magnetometer instrument on its voyage to explore the Sun and the inner solar system.” It’s signed by the instrument PI (Principal Investigator) and instrument manager (my fantastic colleague and labmate Helen).

My name’s going to the Sun! (TBH I’m glad it’s just name. It’s a bit...lethal-radiation-y out there.)

Second is the one from Rosetta.

This as, as its backdrop, a stunning close-up image of Comet 67P taken by the OSIRIS instrument. There’s a sketched Rosetta spacecraft in the upper left corner, and a sketched Philae in the lower right. It reads, “European Space Agency presents this certificate to [nanila] in recognition of your outstanding contribution to the ESA Rosetta Mission.” It’s signed by the Director of Science at ESA, the Rosetta Mission Manager and the Rosetta Project Scientist.

Finally, here’s an old one from the Cluster and Double Star anniversaries.

This one has an image of the Sun and the Earth (not to scale), as well as the Earth’s magnetic field in blue. The four Cluster spacecraft are in formation at the bottom right and the two Double Star spacecraft are closer to the Earth. Also not to scale (“These are small and those are far away”).

The certificate reads “Cluster 15th and Double Star 10th anniversary. ESA and NSSC present this certificate to [nanila] in recognition of your outstanding contribution to the Cluster and Double Star missions.” It’s signed by the Chinese National Space Science Center director, the Cluster & Double Star project scientist and the Director of Science & Robotic Exploration at the European Space Agency.

The Cluster mission is now in its 17th year since the commissioning phase ended and still going strong. The Double Star spacecraft are no longer operational.

I’ve worked on the Cluster mission since 2006.

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#tbt: Moar space history (pre-2006)

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 12:12:25 GMT

[Image of a Cassini spacecraft model inside a black gimbal structure comprised of three concentric rings, mounted on a plexiglass stand and sitting on the corner of a desk.]

Now that I'm back at work, I present another of my Rare Objects from Space History for #tbt. This is a model of the Cassini spacecraft, mounted in the centre of what I can only think to describe as a gimbal. The high gain antenna is pointed toward the bottom of the photo. The model was distributed to instrument teams to aid them with pointing design. It can be rotated around three axes within the gimbal. Each circle of rotation is marked in degrees, so that from a set of numbers indicating its orientation (eg "RA & dec"), an instrument engineer can work out which way the spacecraft is pointing.

I have no idea when it was originally given to our team but it predates me joining the Cassini project (ca 2006).

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#tbt: Some space history from 1996

Thu, 29 Jun 2017 21:41:07 GMT

[Image of a fluxgate magnetometer in its housing with its frayed MLI-coated cable curled round it. The destroyed connectors can be seen. The whole assembly is sitting on top of an antistatic envelope. The sensor housing reads: "CLUSTER-FGM SENSOR 08 FM1", where FM means "flight model".]

I gave an outreach talk at an open day this morning, to about a hundred A-level students, their parents and their teachers. The talk was focused on the Cassini end-of-mission science, but I managed to sneak in this bit of space history when explaining what a magnetometer does.

The fluxgate in the photo above actually went into space for a few brief seconds. It got about 5 km up before it was unceremoniously returned to the Earth. The Ariane 5 rocket that launched the spacecraft whose payload it was part of had exploded, showering the swamps of French Guiana with wreckage.

This sensor sat in that swamp for a good few weeks before a French Foreign Legionnaire fished it out.

I'm afraid that being blown up and mouldering in a tropical pond was, in fact, enough to kill it, but it's still a pretty cool object, and the students seemed to like seeing it very much.

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Cassini’s last Titan flyby

Fri, 21 Apr 2017 11:08:38 GMT

As many of you know, I work on the Cassini mission as an operations engineer and have done for over a decade.

Tomorrow is the spacecraft’s final close flyby (T126) of Saturn’s moon Titan.

Just to put this into perspective for you, this may be the last time in decades that we get anywhere near Titan. There are no missions to Saturn or its most interesting* moons, Titan and Enceladus, currently funded or being built. That means there’s a minimum of ten years before a new mission could be launched. Given that the transit time to Saturn is, at a minimum, seven years and on average more like ten, that’s two decades until we can repeat Cassini’s observations.

Cassini’s impending demise makes me sad, of course, but what bothers me even more is the lack of continuity in our exploration of our solar system.

You can read the details of tomorrow’s Cassini’s observations on the NASA-JPL press release here. It includes an animation of the flyby over the surface, from the perspective of the spacecraft.

* “most interesting” being ever so slightly subjective, of course

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Spaaaaaace

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 16:55:55 GMT

A selfie I took on the bus from Leiden Centraal to Noordwijk. The bus takes about 45 minutes, so most people opt for a taxi when they’re visiting ESTEC. I like the bus, though. It’s a really pretty route through the city and out into the countryside. Plus, it only costs 4 euros.

While I’m on the subject of space agencies, here are a few links.

Want to holiday like an Elder God? Try these lethal exoplanet destinations! Galaxy of Horrors (h/t to redsixwing)
For a more soothing experience, you can watch a mildly animated page of the Deep Space Network stations uplinking and downlinking data from different spacecraft. I sometimes do this. I mean, I have a PDF with all the scheduled DSN passes for Cassini, but let’s face it, this is much prettier. Eyes on the DSN.
And finally, in Geeky Space Swag news, the Rosetta mission shop has been updated with new shirts and hoodies that include the cartoon spacecraft from the “Once Upon a Time” video series about the mission. Best of all, you can get your mitts on a cuddly/plushy toy of Rosetta and Philae, or donate one to be sent to a primary school.

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