A group of students from Royal Grammar School, Guildford is exploring the possibilities of a scientific phenomenon to evaluate its potential for propelling a Tumbleweed Rover through the hills and valleys of Martian terrain.

The project is SSTL’s contribution to this year’s Engineering Education Scheme. EES is an annual event run by The Engineering Development Trust, the largest provider of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) enrichment activities for British young people. The EES links teams of Year 12 pupils with local companies to provide students with first-hand experience in science, engineering and technology that will enable them to make informed decisions about their future.

This isn’t the first time SSTL has sponsored the scheme. Two years ago SSTL supported a team from Farnborough college on a study to "Investigate possible ways of detecting earthquake precursor signals using satellites, to help us move from disaster monitoring to disaster mitigation". The constructive results of the study have been fed into the Mission Concepts team that evaluates new ideas in the innovation underbelly of SSTL.

This year, Sahand Ghanoun from the Flight Software Team is mentoring four students from Royal Grammar School, Guildford to study a "Low cost propulsion system utilising the Crookes radiometer effect". Their study will look into the possibility of using the Crookes radiometer effect as a supplementary source of propulsion for the NASA Tumbleweed Rover.

The spherical Tumbleweed Rovers could be used to explore the valleys of Mars that wheeled probes are unable to reach, relying on the Martian wind to move them around, see this video. SSTL’s Mission Concepts would like to know if the Crookes radiometer effect could provide an alternative means of propulsion when the Martian wind is insufficient to move the Rovers.


The Crookes Radiometer Effect can be observed when metal vanes in a partial vacuum (like the Martian atmosphere) move when exposed to light. The vanes are painted white on one side and black on the other. When exposed to light or infrared radiation the vanes move because the black side of the vane becomes hotter than the white and transfers more heat energy (and therefore, kinetic energy) to the air molecules behind the vane resulting in a new torque in that direction. In addition, another force is exerted by the flow of the gas molecules from the cooler side to the hotter side in an effect known as thermal transpiration.

A combination of wind power and the photo-thermally induced principle on which the Crookes radiometer works would cost less than solar panel powered propulsion and might make the tumbleweed rover concept viable in a shorter timeframe.

The project kicked off on Friday, 4th November, when Sahand presented to the four RGS students and their teachers and gave them a tour of SSTL facilities. The programme will run until April 2012 when the team will show off their work and a report to a team of assessors.

SSTL’s very own Mission and Systems Team Leader Kathryn Graham not only inspires Space Blog readers, but also motivates young people of all ages to become interested in careers within science and engineering as a STEM ambassador. Kathryn reaches out to young people by, for example, visiting schools, where she shares her real-life experience of how exciting a career in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) can be. Not all of us can say that we are employed to come up with new ideas for technologies to be put up in space!

Recently Kathryn engaged with 75 female students age 12-13 at the Warwick School in Redhill, a specialist technology college. Students from five schools in Surrey took part in the event, which was all about ‘Women into Science and Engineering’ (WISE). The day started off with a careers ‘speed dating’, where Kathryn met up with the students one-on-one to answer questions about her job and other STEM careers, such as: What does your job involve? Why did you choose your career? How important are STEM subjects in your job? What qualifications do you have?

The students were set an engineering task in the afternoon to create a self-propelled vehicle containing an egg - which proved to be more difficult than expected to avoid the much-feared ”scrambling effect”!

Continue reading "Reaching out to future space cadets"

This summer, students Charles Cleminson, Teodora Ghiuvea, Calum Jones and Rhys Llewellyn from The Sixth Form College, Farnborough completed a project under the Engineering Education Scheme (EES) in collaboration with SSTL looking at ways to detect signals in space that offer a precursor to earthquakes. Their report was well received by their SSTL and EES mentors, who congratulated them during the award ceremony.

The EES provides students aged 16 and 17 with experience in engineering, science and technology in order to make informed decisions about their future education and career. Working with SSTL, the project aimed to discover a suitable combination of payloads that would successfully identify and monitor the proposed earthquake precursors through regular measurements on a global-scale using a satellite constellation.

According to their very professional end of project paper entitled “A study to examine the feasibility of a constellation of small satellites to detect Earthquake precursor signatures”, up to now we have data only from older missions that are not dedicated to earthquake detection.

The team found that the main failing of previous missions is the lack of continuous measurements, so that statistics could not be built based on data from previous missions. As such, the team proposed, in addition to finding a reliable short term earthquake precursor, their proposed mission should make statistical studies of space-borne precursors of strong earthquakes possible by continuous monitoring. In summary, this data should lead to improved knowledge of the physics behind earthquakes and hopefully save many lives.

The team reviewed a broad range of technologies for detecting earthquakes from correlation with lightning, infra-red emissions, particle precipitation to numerous methods for detecting ionospheric permutations. These were analysed based upon their “prediction capability”, a measure of their ability to answer the three main questions of the short term earthquake prediction: When? Where? How strong?

Their conclusion: that the global monitoring of short term earthquake precursors from space is possible, but that a satellite constellation is necessary if this information is to be used in practice for short-term earthquake prediction.

Aside from the scintillating (no pun intended) discussion of Earthquake detention from space, it was a golden opportunity for the EES scheme team to learn more about space and real world engineering in a commercial environment. SSTL project mentor Dave Sanderson put Space Blog in touch with two of the team members, Rhys and Teodora to talk about their experiences and their future career aspirations.

Continue reading "Education, Earthquakes and Engineering"

SSTL’s military space expert Dr. Stuart Eves has accepted a year’s secondment to the new Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) at the UK’s new Harwell facility to advise on space security. His principal responsibility will be as the authority on the Security and Resilience Unit (SRU) that will form part of the International Space Innovation Centre (ISIC).

Enough with the acronyms! ISIC is a joint venture between the UK Government and Industry, that is anticipated to evolve into a centre which supports both UK national requirements as well as international security-related space systems. The idea is to create a Hub of Innovation that will act as a seed-bed for innovation in the UK.

Stuart will also be expected to actively liaise with the newly formed UK Space Agency on space security matters in support of government policy making, since a close relationship between the policy and strategy aims of the agency and the executive elements at ISIC will clearly be essential.

Continue reading "Space security guru Stuart to advise government"