Call for 2010 'Fly your thesis' propsals

The time has come for the next call for the ESA 'Fly your thesis' competition proposals.  'Fly your thesis' is an ESA run competition for Masters/PhD students to propose a microgravity experiment that could be run in the upcoming microgravity parabolic flight campaign.  The winning teams and their experiments will end up on board an A300 specially fitted out to fly in a large parabolic flightpath.  During the parabola the aircraft, the occupants and all of the experiments on board are placed into free fall and experience weightlessness.  This lasts for about 25seconds and is repeated 30 times a day.  A typical flight campaign will go for 3 days, giving 90 parabolas of microgravity.
Last year a team of four of our final year MEng Astro stu

dents entered the competition.  They did very well, making it all the way to the final selection committee.  Unfortunately they were not selected to fly.  This year we want to get all the way!

If you would like to submit a proposal for this competition then come see either me or Dr Welchwith your ideas!

Racing to the Moon - Monday 11 May

If you are looking for a break from exams next month or need a bit of inspiration, how about this?

"Four decades after the first Moon landings, the original space-racers have been joined by China, India, South Korea, even Nigeria. Why do we still need manned missions? Does space exploration need countries to cooperate, or does it benefit from the oxygen of international conflict and mistrust? Join a lively debate on colonizing the Moon between scientists, historians and commentators. This is the first of two King's Place summer events organized by the weekly science journal Nature."

See here for more info.

Future Flying

There are many more aircraft than spacecraft in this, but I couldn't resist the lastest offering from WebUrbanist. Tear yourself away from the end-of-term blues for a few minutes and indulge in some Futuristic Flying: Brilliant Prototype & Concept Airplanes.

Where are they now? - Daniel Martins

Not all our alumni end working in the space sector - some pursue other dreams. Daniel Martins graduated in 2003 after doing an industrial placement with EADS Astrium (who also supplied his final year project) and a group project looking at the thermal protection for an inflatable re-entry capsule for ESA's Young Engineer's Satellite -2 project (which eventually flew in 2007). After graduation, Daniel's dream of flying became stronger than his dream of engineering and he returned to Portugal to learn to fly. After a period as a flight instructor he obtained his type rating with TAP and later moved to Macau where he is a pilot for Air Macau flying A319/320/321s.

Summer Internship At NASA Ames

If you have excellent computer skills then this might be the job for you - help NASA put scientific papers on the map of Mars. NASA Ames, are working with Google, Inc., and the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System to get scientific papers geo-located on Mars. They need a summer intern to help with the following:

• create an initial seed of test data
• develop the supervised parsing strategies for extracting geospatial data from scientific plain text
• develop the information architecture for doing all of this
• create the presentation of the geographic data for Google Mars 3D

See here for more information.

Holiday on Mars this summer!

I missed this earlier in the month, but Expedia ran an April Fool's Day ad campaign for holidays on Mars. So, if you fancy dust-surfing, a Mars historical tour or climbing Olympus Mons (the biggest mountain the solar system), follow the link :).

Go Barnaby!

I'm very pleased to report that, recognising his research in precision optics, Barnaby has been awarded a Business Fellowhip Scheme award with the National Physical Laboratory for the development of Mirrorlite - a carbon fibre reinforced polymer telescope mirror. No wonder he looks happy!