Year 2 Astro Visit to Astrium

Today, the Year 2 Astro class (and a handful of Year 3s) visited the EADS Astrium facility in Stevenage, which is responsible for the structure and subsystem design and build for all Eurostar communications satellites and is prime contractor for science missions such as Beagle 2 Mars lander, Rosetta and Lisa Pathfinder and Earth observation satellites such as Aeolus.

After a welcome from Alistair Scott, we were given an introduction to the company by Nick Gregory (who graduated from the MEng Astro last year) and then presentations on Cubesats by Ronan Wall, Mission Systems by Nic Leveque, Future Missions by Elie Allouis (the latter two also Kingston alumni) and Propulsion Systems by Bob Baldwin. Thank you to all of these. After lunch we were taken on a tour of the site where we saw a wide variety of spacecrtaft being built and also Bridget, Astrium prototype Mars Rover. Unfortunately, we couldn't take photographs inside the site :(