Hot and Cold

A very snowy Natural History Museum

I like snow. It makes everything look clean and reminds me that nature is definitely more in charge of our lives than we would like to admit. That being said- snow is a real pain when you actually have to go out and do something useful. Having spent most of the past week in bed with the flu by Friday I was determined to go outside and talk to someone that wasn't my long-suffering boyfriend. In my case this meant going to the UK Planetary Forum’s 10th Earth Career Planetary Scientist’s Meeting (yes… I know that’s a bit of a mouthful) at the Natural History Museum in central London. Having arranged to meet a friend from work outside the entrance and with my mother’s nagging voice in my head (i.e. wearing a woolly hat, scarf, gloves, jumper, coat and making my boyfriend wear much of the same – including his cowboy hat as he couldn’t find his umbrella and his coat doesn’t have a hood) I set off with my boyfriend for central London. He is currently doing his PhD at Imperial College London, which is just around the corner from the Natural History Museum.

I got to the Natural History Museum eventually, but central London is a long way from MSSL. In fact pretty much everything is a long way from MSSL, which can and does come as a bit of a shock to most people who actually try to get there (thinking it’s part of University College LONDON so it must be IN London). MSSL is basically at the top of a big hill in the middle of the Surrey countryside. It’s a very friendly community to work in, probably in part due to its isolation (you’ve got to stick together if it’s just you and the werewolves/vampires/zombies – it can feel like the ‘Silent Hill’ computer game on a foggy winter evening). The site has flats available for first year PhD students and its own very helpful driver, who had arrived at the student flats early on Friday morning and told my friend not to bother coming into London as she probably wouldn’t be able to get home again.

I suppose I should just say now that I’m naturally very cautious around new people. I know networking is something I really need to work on if I want a career in science. My boyfriend got a placement in an American research lab last summer, just because he happened to talk to the right person at a conference. Ok, so the whole process of his getting there (and my getting an amazing holiday in San Francisco because of it!) was a lot more complicated that but you get the picture- talking to people at conferences (and not just sitting quietly with the people you came with) is very important. Still, I’m only a first year and I have to keep reminding myself that if I knew how to do all this stuff already I would not be doing a PhD.

Holding pieces of an asteroid

So here I am, sitting quietly (not with the people I came with because I didn’t come with anyone – is that worse?), listening to interesting talks from space physics PhD students from all over the country. Most students seemed to be working on something to do with Mars, Saturn or Jupiter in line with the current missions currently proposed/active. My supervisor and lots of other people from MSSL spent a long time before Christmas working on MSSL’s contribution to JUICE (the ESA led mission to Jupiter and its moons) and studies of the Jupiter system seem likely to be the next big thing in space physics. No one else was looking at comets. This is a little disheartening but there is a meeting about comets at the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in March so hopefully I’ll get to meet the whole cometary community then (and hopefully we won’t all fit in one meeting room…). In a way it’s good that not many people are looking at my subject area as it means that I can look at lots of different aspects of cometary science without worrying too much about treading on other people’s toes. You have to be very careful about this in planetary science. In general everyone gets the same data from space missions so the planetary science community has to sit down and decide which aspect each individual is going to look at. If your research is not original it won’t get published and you could lose your funding.

Asteroid Capture

One interesting talk was about finding planets around other stars, called Exoplanets. This science is in its infancy because you need very expensive equipment and complicated techniques to be able to detect the minute changes to the brightness of a host star caused by an orbiting planet. The bigger the Exoplanet, and the closer it is to its parent star, the larger the effect on the brightness of the star and so unsurprisingly most detections have been of large planets very close to their host star. For this reason they are often called ‘Hot Jupiters’. The talk was about trying to model what kind of environment might be present on one of these planets, but as it is very different to anything we could encounter in our own solar system we’ll probably never be able to achieve this unless we actually send missions outside our solar system and investigate. This might sound ludicrous but as I heard a talk just before Christmas on how to collect a WHOLE asteroid and put it in a stable position in the Earth-Moon system (so we can have it at our beck and call to practice space mining), I was willing to keep an open mind. These ideas probably are ludicrous, but people are still interested in doing them anyway. How wonderful is that?!

Last Week

For many years now we’ve been told by various soothsayers that the end is nigh. Apparently the last date in the Mayan calendar is December 21^st 2012, and so the Mayans (at least) didn’t expect there to be anyone around after that date. Various films have tried to imagine the end of the world and though most are scientifically inaccurate (sometimes annoyingly so!) there are a few potential causes of an actual apocalypse. In today’s world predicting disaster is big business and many resources are now being poured into research with this aim in mind. Our understanding of everything from climate science to space weather is constantly being improved to best ensure mankind’s continued dominance on this planet.

Asteroid Lutetia as seen by
Rosetta, 10 July 2010.

You might have guessed by now that I specialized in space physics at university. I am now studying for a PhD in space science at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL, part of UCL), looking at one potential cause of disaster on Earth: comets. The Rosetta mission was designed by ESA to visit to a comet and study it as it goes from being a boring lump of water ice and dust, to the original solar system trailblazer. Rosetta has already successfully completed a couple of flybys of asteroids but in 2014 (roughly half way through my PhD) it should reach its comet (67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko or Chewy-Gooey to its friends), land a probe on the surface and take the first in-situ measurements of the region directly surrounding the nucleus. My PhD should get very exciting at this point, as new data will hopefully reveal new physics.

Tail of Comet Hale-Bopp

While I wait for Rosetta to wake up I’m looking at Earth based cometary measurements. My supervisor is hoping I will be able to predict the shape of cometary tails for future great comets, with the chance for me to make some astronomical observations to test my results (hopefully somewhere fantastically tropical). There should be a few of these comets to look at in 2013 (possibly also visible with the naked eye) but I’m currently looking at Hale-Bopp as a test for my models. Day to day I write computer simulations and read papers from scientific journals. The work is very challenging but the environment at MSSL is very supportive. Cake club on Mondays and free tea at 3pm everyday also ensure that I’ve got no excuse to stay in my room all day and stare blankly at a computer/book/paper.

If you’re reading this as an undergraduate then I’m sure you have had/will have extremely challenging moments. Undergraduate life is designed to challenge and classify students, often in a way that can leave you feeling as though you’re at the bottom of the pile. I found the best way to get through these moments was to keep a clear idea of why you are doing a degree in the first place and to remember that however bad it got it wouldn’t be like that forever. I also found that the best way to do accomplish this was to give tours to applicants to your department. Somehow seeing the genuine enthusiasm of students that hadn’t yet become overloaded with assignments makes you remember why you love your subject and why you chose your department. Until you’ve done a degree yourself I don’t think you can understand how difficult it can be at certain times and how much you need friends and family to support you through it. There are always people around to support you and every other student is going through the same issues, even if they appear to be coping well on the surface.

My undergraduate days were spent at Imperial College London. I met the two loves of my life while I was there: my boyfriend and space physics. When I started at Imperial I had no idea what area of physics I was most interested in, or even if I wanted a career as a scientist, and was very lucky that I chose a university that allowed me to specialise in solar system physics – including working in the magnetometer laboratory on an internship and studying comets during my MSci project. I, like every other wide-eyed new PhD student, am fantastically in love with my project and the whole subject of cometary physics in general. I feel immensely privileged that I get to study something that could actually have delivered the original building blocks of life to Earth and could one day destroy us all.

If you’re reading this now then I suppose the Mayan version of the  ‘Millennium Bug’ was resolved amicably and my PhD subject hasn’t ended life on Earth as we know it, but where do we go from here? Perhaps you know exactly what you want to do with your life or perhaps, like me, you only have a vague idea. In 3 years time it will be the end of my PhD studentship and I’ll have to make a decision but for now I’m amazed that I get paid to be interested, inspired and constantly entertained.