• Question: What is your favorite project that you have worked on as an engineer?

    Asked by upmostword95 to Adam, Alexander, Aron, Jess, Neil on 10 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Aron Kisdi

      Aron Kisdi answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      The ESA project called SAFER (the extension to SEEKER) as I got to work with an exciting group of people and to got to go to the Atacama desert in Chile to test the rover. The Atacama is what we call a Mars analog, as in many ways especially visually it looks very much like Mars.

    • Photo: Neil Bowles

      Neil Bowles answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      I very much enjoyed working on an instrument for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). We helped to build an instrument like a thermal imaging camera with colleague at NASA’s Jet propulsion laboratory (JPL) in California, US. I got to help with testing the components we built and then went out to help test the complete instrument using the equipment at JPL. We then got to go to the launch of the spacecraft in Florida and saw some of the results come back once the spacecraft got into lunar orbit a few days later. Being one of the first people to ever see into the cold shadowed craters at the lunar south pole was pretty amazing.

    • Photo: Jessica Marshall

      Jessica Marshall answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      I have loved working for 4 years on the BepiColombo mission to Mercury. Look it up on the ESA website – it is a very complicated mission as it is 3 spacecraft joined together. It also uses electric propulsion – firing ions out of the spacecraft to give it a thrust. I have seen these special thrusters firing in the test chamber and they give off a blue plume which looks very surreal. The whole project is as a big as a bus, so there is lots going on in the spacecraft design!

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