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 21st 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.
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| Asteroid Lutetia as seen by Rosetta, 10 July 2010. |
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| 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.
lots of asteroids in the news today
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