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?!