Profile

I’m always on the go and always busy having fun.

I live in Norwich with my partner and two boys. But I stay near London during the week because I work in Guildford. I get to work from home a lot though so I get to spend a lot of time with my boys in Norwich.

As well as enjoying what I do for work (it’s great being paid to do your hobby), I enjoy doing outreach work; which is where we go and teach or give talks and lectures or tours around our facilities to show people our spacecraft being built.

I enjoy spending time with good company, travelling to see friends all over the world, trying new food and having good natter. I spend my evenings swing dancing or playing computer games. I dance in a troupe called Brat Pack; we compete and perform both at home and abroad. We rehearse every week which always ends up with pub time afterwards.

I love being outside, climbing and hiking in the Mountains. I love being out in the rain too. I’m very inquisitive so love exploring and learning about the would around me; from exploring the universe to learning about subatomic particles.

My other hobbies include canoeing, playing the piano and making fireworks. I also occasionally teach canoeing or dancing which is a lot of fun.

Like a said, my work is very varied. Which is really good; I never get bored at work. It is really nice to be given lots of different challenges to solve. Ultimately though, everything I do is working towards putting things into space and making sure it works.

I work in the AOCS Equipment team. We are responsible for all the sensors that we use for measuring things on the spacecraft. We design the Sun Sensors for measuring where the sun is (this tells us where to point out solar panels), Star Cameras for measuring the position of the stars (so can work out where our telescope is pointing), the Gyroscopes for measuring how fast the spacecraft is spinning, the Radiation Monitors measure how much particle and electromagnetic radiation there is and how much energy the individual particles have (so we can monitor the space weather and calculate how much damage has been done to the electronics on the spacecraft)…. and the list goes on; if there is something to measure, we are responsible for measuring it.

Right now I’m designing the equipment we’ll use to measure the performance of our new gyroscope design. That involves thinking about how to measure things really really accurately (the gyroscope itself is that accurate it can tell you your latitude on the surface of the Earth because it is sensitive enough to measure the Earth’s rotational rate, which is only about 0.004 °/second). This sounds easy but uncertainty is always present when measuring anything, there is no such thing as 100% certain and there is no such thing as 100% accurate, ever!. My job right now is is understand all of the uncertainties and design a way to minimise them.

My other jobs at the moment include reviewing other peoples work. In science and engineering we value something called “Peer Review”; this is a bit like checking each other’s homework to make sure there are no mistakes. In the space industry peer review is king; once our spacecraft is in orbit… it’s not as if we can go and fix it!!!

In my time at SSTL I’ve designed star cameras, radiation monitors, rocket motor control electronics and lots and lots of other really cool stuff.

I run a rocket science workshop in schools where pupils get to learn and experiment with the principles behind rocket science… to show that it’s fun and not as complicated as you might think, well it’s not rocket science after all 😀

The culmination of the workshop is the pupils building and launching their own model rockets.

The money will be put towards better equipment for demonstrations and perhaps a small camera for mounting to to top of the pupil’s rockets to record their flights.

Rockets like this one for example: