Space Missions
Apollo Lunar Programme
In 1968, at the
University of Bristol, I was one of the lucky few to be a part of
NASA's great lunar adventure to put the first men on the Moon. I got the job because someone else turned it down saying he "couldn't see it had long term career prospects". I analysed samples from all the
Apollo Program missions and Soviet robotic
Luna missions and contributed to the understanding of how the solar wind (a stream of particles, containing, amongst other things, the elements hydrogen and carbon) affects the properties of the lunar soil.
Beagle 2
I was both consortium leader and lead scientist for
Beagle 2, a UK-led project to land a spacecraft on Mars. The lander was designed to repeat experiments that we had performed on martian meteorites (see
Research section) which suggested the presence of life on Mars. It would also search for water, analyse rocks, measure their ages and study the environment. Beagle 2 involved most of the academic laboratories in the UK interested in planetary sciences and a large contingent of the country's industrial space community, particularly EADS-Astrium. It was launched to Mars on 2nd June 2003 and was due to land at 2:54 am Christmas morning that year. No radio communications were ever received from the tiny lander. The search for its whereabouts, and hence an understanding of what went wrong, continues.
Back to the Moon with Beagle 2
Many nations, now have an interest in returning to the Moon with humans. I am working with NASA's
Johnson Space Center, Houston, investigating how Beagle 2 technology might be used to search for water resources on the Moon. The United States is considering a possible permanent base near the lunar south pole because such a site would be in almost permanent sunlight but close also to the craters which never see the sun. These regions could have acted as cold traps, freezing out water and other volatiles, delivered to the Moon by comets or produced in situ by solar wind bombardment.
Rosetta Comet Chaser
Throughout history, people have been in awe of the astronomical firework displays produced when a comet swings past the sun. To understand the phenomenon, the
European Space Agency has launched a mission, called
Rosetta, to a comet. The spacecraft carries a lander named Philae. The spacecraft is designed to rendez-vous with the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko and accompany it on its journey through the inner solar system. I was selected as the Principal Investigator to supply a mass spectrometer, called
Ptolemy, built at the Open University, to analyse various constituents of the comet nucleus.
Genesis
In order to understand how the Earth and the other planets were produced from the dust and gas that gave birth to the Solar System it is necessary to know the initial bulk composition of the primordial cloud. One way of achieving this is to measure the abundance of elements and isotopes that make up the sun's corona and give rise to the solar wind. I was a part of the team which conceived the
Genesis mission, a spacecaft sent to "hover" outside the Earth's manetosphere, collect atoms from the solar wind and return samples to Earth for analysis.
Flying Stones
Although we have over forty martian meteorites (see
Research section on Earth it is a puzzle why none of them are the type of rocks that might have been formed in the conditions which must have existed when Mars was much wetter than it is now. The vast majority are relatively young rocks whereas photographs from orbiting satellites suggest the planet's surface is much older. The flying stones project is an attempt to make artificial meteorites to help identify more and different types of martian meteorites.
Planetary Protection
So far
Beagle 2 is the only spacecraft built in Europe which conforms to what are called Planetary Protection regulations. This means that the spacecraft must not take terrestrial biology (micro-organisms) to planets where an indigenous biology could already exist or one where life might develop. Such spacecraft must not do anything which could confuse the search for life beyond Earth. The regulations also exist to prevent Earth being endangered by hostile organisms from another planet. I am advising a number of space missions, e.g. Exomars, on how to meet their obligations.
