![]() ![]() SARP is our eight-week summer program for college seniors with academic backgrounds in engineering or physical, chemical or biological sciences and an interest in remote sensing. But one of the most awesome methods we have of training young scientists and preparing them for potential hire here (or a great position anywhere) is by recruiting university undergraduates for our Student Airborne Research Program (SARP). Well, there’s more than one way to get hired here. The service and facility are all part of the Portsmouth Research Institute for Space Missions (PRISM), which is focused on connecting academia and industry to make the UK a great space nation.We receive a lot of questions, especially from students, asking us for information about how to get a job at NASA. All of these questions are about ‘exploring the trade space’, which is key to designing an effective mission.” We analysed the best orbit for the satellite to try and hitch a free ride, and what kind of propulsion system would be needed. For example, we explored how long the satellite would be blocked from the earth, so we could work out the data collection period. “Working with industry specialists allowed us to come up with a more robust design because we could analyse various situations that might affect the mission. “Space mission design has traditionally taken a linear approach, which is why it can take such a long time, but concurrent mission design - having everyone working on different elements of design in the same room at the same time together - you can quickly iterate through any challenges and speed up the development of space missions. Last summer I spent some time at NASA JPL to see this concurrent approach in action and it’s been amazing to reproduce this at Portsmouth within a year. Space Projects Manager at the ICG, and manager of the Space Mission Incubator, Dr Lucinda King, said: “It’s been really exciting to work on this pilot project in our brand new facility. The results of this pilot will now help us to plan the next steps.” Dr Lucinda King did a superb job in this role. But what was really key was the incubator steering role as this person had to take the team through the relevant steps at the right time and glue all expertise together. ![]() “Engaging with industry experts helped the project move fast, but also generated relevant contacts for future collaborations. The room and IT facilities were superb and despite it being the first time they were properly used, it worked extremely well. Principal Investigator for CosmoCube, Dr Eloy de Lera Acedo, Associate Professor of radio cosmology at the University of Cambridge, said: “I’ve never been part of anything like this before, but I think CosmoCube evolved more in three days than in the previous 12 months. Testing which lunar orbits could provide the most amount of shielding time from the Earth was a key outcome of the pilot study. “This is about measuring the behaviour of the early universe, to see what that can tell us about its visible - and invisible - contents.”Īs the signal to be measured is so weak, the satellite needs to be at the far side of the Moon to block all the radio-frequency noise from Earth when making measurements. He said: “We want to see what happened very far away and extraordinarily long ago, towards the beginning of the universe’s history, before stars even started to shine. Professor David Bacon, from the University’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, is leading Portsmouth’s hopes to send a satellite to the far side of the Moon. The project is led by the University of Cambridge, with University of Portsmouth academics also part of the wider team. This pilot study involved CosmoCube, a cosmology mission receiving radio waves, that will explore the so-called Dark Ages of the Universe. The unique new Space Mission Incubator service is inspired by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who first pioneered the use of concurrent design engineering for space mission design an innovative approach that allows teams of experts from different disciplines to work in the same place at the same time. The first study in the University of Portsmouth’s new Space Mission Incubator saw science and engineering experts working together in real time to rapidly develop a space mission that will place a small satellite in orbit around the Moon. ![]()
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