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

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.

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.

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

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/

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!

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 )

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.

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

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.