• Question: what does the future hold for you?

    Asked by 559spah48 to Stephen, rochellevelho, Phil, Lucy on 8 Mar 2017.
    • Photo: Lucy Kissick

      Lucy Kissick answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      Who can say? Hopefully before four years are up I will have earned my PhD (meaning I can call myself Dr Lucy) and will have a proper job doing something space-y out in the real world. My dream is to direct the scientific motivations behind rovers of the kind Stephen works on — decide where to direct it on Mars or other planets/moons, then interpret the returned data.

      There are two rovers planned for 2020 (NASA and ESA’s), so it would be perfect but probably unrealistic for me to hop on the science team the moment I’m graduated!

    • Photo: Phil Sutton

      Phil Sutton answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      I’d like to think that some of the new large telescopes planned in the future will start to open up a whole new area of work on planet formation and even gravitational waves. Some ones of interest to myself that I hope to make use of in the future are:

      SKA – Square kilometer array of radio telescopes. This will give very impressive images of objects in the radio part of the spectrum. Could be used to look at much more distance young planetary systems where planets are already forming.

      EELT – European Extremely Large Telescope. This is under construction now and will be quite a while until completion. However, it is a 40m telescope and considering that our biggest so far is about 10m this is going to be a truly huge telescope. Again we should be able to directly image and find new planets forming with such facilities.

      Either way I see myself still working in science and astrophysics for a long time yet.

    • Photo: Stephen Pulker

      Stephen Pulker answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      The next year will be spent finalising the rover design / build and testing the rover prototype. Next year will be testing the real rover which will go to mars. Then, we hand over the rover to ESA and I probably wont see it again until it is launching / landing in 2020 🙂
      I should think there will be lots of other interesting projects to get involved with after the rover has finished. Have a look at ESAs website to see what kind of thing they do, and have a look at Airbus Defence and Space’s website to see what kind of work we do here at Stevenage.
      Other than that, on a personal front, I think the next few years will be dominated by raising my daughter (getting her interested in all things science).

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