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The Space Universities Network (SUN) aims to enhance the quality of learning and teaching by providing support and resources to the higher education space science and engineering community. We wish to help create a skilled workforce of graduates who can meet the challenges of future space exploration and exploitation. This is the first of a series of Space industry webinars aimed at University staff and students.
This Webinar is comprised of a 20 minute talk by Dr Nigel Wright, an interview with him and a live Q&A from the audience. His talk will briefly discuss the significance of comets as objects in our solar system, describe the journey undertaken by the spacecraft and how it manoeuvres to be in the same orbit as the comet. The talk will also discuss some of the challenges faced by the engineering team designing a spacecraft for this unique mission.
Dr Nigel Wright was the Engineering Manager for the Rosetta spacecraft platform during the design phase in the late 1990’s. Later Nigel was also the Project Director for the Ptolemy scientific experiment on the Rosetta lander (Philae), provided by the UK. Nigel has spent over 35 years working on various scientific spacecraft missions including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Planck mission to map the Cosmic Microwave Background and Mars Express/Beagle 2 and a number of European Earth Observation missions (ERS-2, ENVISAT and EarthCARE) aimed at understanding the Earth’s climate. He has just started work on his latest project which is the Copernicus CO2M mission which is concerned with the monitoring of anthropogenic CO2 production.