Profile

I recently(ish) graduated as an engineer from university. I’ve always been super interested in Space, and started my first proper job working in the Space Industry last August.

I’m living in Oxford at the moment, which nice and flat – very good for cycling. Apart from cycling, I love going on holiday to the mountains for skiing and hiking, though sometimes I feel like I need another holiday to recover afterwards!

After graduating from university, but before starting my job, I spent a month working sailing yachts in Greece (super fun, but very very hot); and three months working in a ski resort in Austria (very very cold).

I work at RAL Space, which is part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council. My job is to organise the design and manufacture of Multi-Layer Insulation (often called MLI). Multi-Layer Insulation is a kind of ‘space blanket’ which helps to keep a spacecraft’s temperature at the right level (not too hot and not too cold). The shiny yellow bits on the spacecraft below are MLI.

Here’s how it works:

There’s three kinds of ways heat can be moved from one place to another. These are conduction, convection and radiation.

Conduction is where heat moves through a solid object. If you touch a hot stove, it’s conduction that causes your hand to burn!

Convection is how heat moves through a liquid or a gas. Imagine you and your friend are standing in a pool. If your friend pees in the pool, you’ll soon know about it! That’s because the heat has been carried by convection to where you’re standing.

The last one is radiation. This sounds scary, but radiation is just light. This is how the sun warms up the earth, it emits light waves, which travel across space and are absorbed by the earth.

This picture shows a summary of the different kinds of heat transfer:

Space is a vacuum, which means that there’s no air (or anything else) touching a spacecraft when it’s in orbit. This means that conduction and convection aren’t very important, all the heat transfer is done by radiation. On earth, if you stand in the sun, you’ll get warmed up, but you’ll also lose lots of heat to the air around you, or through your feet to the ground. This stops you overheating and melting!

If we just left a spacecraft with no insulation, the sun would heat it up, but it wouldn’t be able to get rid of its heat, so it would get hotter and hotter until it broke! (probably by exploding or melting). So, we have to stop sunlight hitting the spacecraft. It turns out that the easiest way to do this is with a mirror. The mirrors we use will reflect about 97% of the light. This sounds pretty good, but sunlight is very strong! So we have a series of very thin mirrors, each one reflecting the little bit of light that gets through. Sometimes we have 20 layers of mirrors! This is where the ‘Multi-Layer’ bit of the name comes from.

In between the mirror layers, we put layers of thin netting. This stops the mirrors from touching each other, and transferring heat by conduction. We want radiation only! You can see a bunch of different layers in the photo of MLI below:

I hope my explanation wasn’t too long! Here’s a cool picture of spacecraft which landed on Titan with MLI on as a reward:

I work for RAL Space in Harwell, the building I work in is pretty cool, it looks like this:

I work in an office, but we have lots of cleanrooms which are special labs which are (you guessed it) very clean. To keep them clean, you have to wear special outfits to prevent icky stuff from your body (dead skin, hair etc.) contaminating the spacecraft. The person in the picture below is wearing one.

In the building there’s also two massive vacuum chambers which are used to test spacecraft components.

Spacecraft are generally really expensive and complicated machines. What this means is that lots of people, and often lots of companies/organisations are involved in building one. We have to make sure that all our parts fit together, so there’s lots of communication involved. Normally, we send each other emails, but every now and then we have big meetings which can involve up to 20 people!

Apart from that, one of the big problems with spacecraft is that once it’s launched, you can’t go up and fix it if something goes wrong! This means if we have to do something we haven’t done before, like use a new material, or a new manufacturing method, we have to test it to make sure it will work! So I perform tests and write test reports (sadly writing the report often takes longer than the test)