Another “victim” of my sorting & clearing ahead of our move: five copies of my 1988 University of Edinburgh PhD thesis headed for recycling 😬✌️
But don’t panic: these are all water-damaged & I still have eight clean copies of the one hundred originally printed for me during my first postdoc at NASA Goddard 🚀🛰️
The rest were circulated to colleagues back in the early days of infrared arrays in astronomy 🔭
Fingers crossed for my friends in the ESA #BepiColombo mission operations team & colleagues from industry as they work to restore the solar electric propulsion system to full power 🤞
The SEP system is critical to adjust Bepi’s trajectory between the various Mercury flybys, slowing the spacecraft down ahead of entry into orbit around this enigmatic innermost planet in December 2025.
#OTD six years ago, our very first #SpaceRocks event at the O2 in London 🚀
Quite the cast for the inaugural event, with Tim Peake, Brian May, Beth Healey, John Mitchell, Maggie Lieu, Alastair Reynolds, Helen Keen, Dallas Campbell, & many more, with Lonely Robot, Arcane Roots, & Charlotte Hatherley providing the music 🎸
There have been other Space Rocks gigs & many Uplink livestreams since then, but it still feels as if we've only just got started 🙂👍
Transferring around 80GB of videos from my phone to a backup drive: lots of interesting things taken over the past three years or so.
Here's one: my view of Ariane 5 VA256 in the BAF at CSG Kourou in French Guiana on 23 December 2021, with #JWST on top, ahead of rollout to launch pad ELA-3 & their flight into space legend on Christmas Day.
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 🚀🛰️☄️
The colours of Sirius: first astrophoto outing with the new iPhone 15 Pro 🙂👍
Hand held & manually trailed from top-left to bottom-right during a 30 sec long timelapse with ProCam, using the telephoto camera deliberately defocussed, 1/30 sec individual exposure time ⭐️📷
After 15 years, yesterday was my last at #ESTEC as an ESA staff member*, & as is my longstanding habit, it ended with me cycling home late at night 🌖🚴♂️
Well, I am an astronomer, after all 🔭🤷♂️🙂
It has been a privilege, & there is much & there are many I will miss 🙇♂️
But I’m not retiring: next, a move to Germany 🇳🇱➡️🇩🇪, science with #JWST, talks & tours, writing a book, & many Space Rocks events & projects in development 🖖🤘
While not directly space-related, this piece of granite gave up its ancient home to help us delve deeper than ever into the Universe.
It comes from Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Atacama desert, the summit of which was levelled ahead of the construction of the 39-metre diameter Extremely Large Telescope by the European Southern Observatory.
I picked it up in 2016 – the telescope is due to come online in 2028 ✨🔭
Another find in my ESA office as I clear it out ahead of my imminent departure: some fragments recovered from the explosion of the first Ariane 5 flight V88 / 501 on 4 June 1996, carrying the four Cluster magnetospheric satellites 🛰️🛰️🛰️🛰️
The satellites were rebuilt & successfully launched on two Soyuz rockets in 2000: they are still in operation today, although their end is near now 🥺
"A fresh, icy crust hides a deep, enigmatic ocean. Plumes of water burst through cracks in the ice, shooting into space. An intrepid lander collects samples and analyses them for hints of life."
Sometimes, things just come together perfectly 🍻🙇♂️
There’s also a #JWST connection here – we visited the Ayinger Brauerei south-east of Munich almost 20 years ago, when there for a Science Working Group meeting at the EADS Astrium facility where NIRSpec was built 🚀🛰️🔭📷
Many items of space swag & merch are coming to light as I clear out my office at ESTEC. Here are two from opposite ends of the price spectrum:
A hand-painted Royal Delft porcelain plate (number 92/100) made ahead of the Rosetta launch … and ahead of its rescheduling to March 2004 & to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko ☄️😳
An NGST coffee (probably) from the late 1990s, before it was renamed JWST & when the mission proudly wore its influences on its sleeve 🛰️🔭
I’m looking forward to getting back to some ground-based astronomy after my time with ESA 🔭
But I had quite forgotten the adrenaline that comes with making final edits of ESO VLT proposals & watching the PI’s submit them with less than 10 minutes remaining to the deadline 😱
I think I’m getting too old for that nonsense now 👴
My 44th & final presentation of recent results from ESA’s missions to the Science Programme Committee in our Paris HQ today 🚀🛰️✨
Why final? Because after 15 years, I’ll be retiring from ESA in just a few weeks from now 😱
It has been a privilege to be involved in so many history-making spaceflight moments over that time, with Rosetta & JWST perhaps primus inter pares, & I will miss my amazing colleagues 🙇♂️
#OTD in 2004: ESA’s Rosetta probe & its lander Philae started their ten-year journey towards Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko & spaceflight history 🚀🛰️☄️
Launched on an Ariane 5G+ at 04:17 local / 07:17 UT from Europe’s spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, Rosetta & Philae had three gravity assists at Earth & one at Mars ahead of them, plus two asteroid flybys & 2.5 years of deep space hibernation, before their rendezvous with the comet in August 2014.
One last gig in Delhi before heading back to Europe tomorrow: recording with Aryaan & Amira Arora for their Under The Tree podcast on spirituality. Their mum also hijacked the show & spent half an hour talking to me 🤷♂️🙂
Indeed, perhaps not the average topic for an astronomer to talk about, especially an atheist one, but the conversation was open & interesting, so I look forward to seeing the outcome 👍
When agreeing to take part in the SYNAPSE tech conference in Delhi over the weekend, I asked the team if they could also arrange for me to meet with some local kids as well.
So it was a great privilege to visit the Shiv Nadar School in Gurgaon today & give a couple of talks about #JWST, one to a 15-16 year old group & the other to these 11-12 year olds.
As ever in India, the kids were smart, attentive, & had good questions at the end 🇮🇳🙂👍
Actually, that picture was taken in December in a freezing cold telescope dome at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, with snow coming through the open slit 🥶
So perhaps it’s just my permanently grizzled state these days 🤷♂️🤪
Journalist, editor, & curator Shoma Chaudhury opening the first SYNAPSE meeting in Delhi today – many interesting folk on tap to talk about rapid advances in science & technology, how they enable innovation, but also the critical ethical & policy discussions that need to be had around them.
I’ll be speaking tomorrow about the discoveries the NASA/ESA/CSA #JWST is enabling, along with many other space science missions & ground-based telescopes.
#Tigger knew exactly what was going on when he saw me putting stuff in my travel bag this morning & made sure he checked that every shirt & pair of socks had been correctly packed 😼
He then plunked himself down to sleep on my bed, to await my return next week 😽🥺
Off to India today for a series of talks on #JWST 🇮🇳🚀🛰️🔭
“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); “now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was!" 🤨
The first time I saw the NASA/ESA/CSA #JWST in the cleanroom at Kourou on 5 November 2021, seven weeks before it was launched into space on an Ariane 5 & opened out en-route to L2 🙂