Came in to remove the remaining items from my office, less than five hours before I cease to be a ESA staff member 🥺
But I’ve left one important thing here, to remind whoever comes next of just what Europe can achieve when the brilliant talents of its scientists, engineers, communicators, administrators, & managers combine to take on ambitious goals 🚀🛰️☄️
Listening to a presentation by new comms colleagues on how best to communicate space missions.
Through story telling, strong visuals, emotions, audience interaction, protagonists & antagonists, quests, journeys, monsters to be overcome, centring the people involved, exciting images, building tension, & so on.
All true.
But no mention of any of this. It’s as if it never happened … 🙄
Was in a seminar this morning with my old ESA colleague, Manfred Warhaut, former head of the Mission Operations Department at ESOC.
Which gives me the excuse to post this iconic picture we're both in from 20 January 2014, at the moment when Rosetta woke from its 2.5 year long deep space hibernation ahead of its rendezvous with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko later that year.
Goosebumps to this day, almost a decade later 🙇♂️
#OTD nine years ago: ESA’s Rosetta deploys Philae towards the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko 🛰️☄️
It remains one of the greatest honours of my life to have been involved with the mission & to work with so many amazing people spanning science, engineering, operations, outreach, & communications 🙇♂️