SEA engineer interviewed on Stargazing Live
As a warm up for BBC 2's Stargazing Live - which started again on January 8 2013 - reporter Jules Hyam, of BBC Points West, interviewed Mike Guest, a senior engineer at SEA, to find out about what work the company is doing in the UK's satellite programme.
Hyam said that satellites are built to look back at Earth, and they are full of equipment, some of which is being designed in Bristol for the next UK space mission.
Guest showed Hyam some of that equipment and explained: “What we have here is a broadband radiometer instrument, which is an instrument for EarthCARE, being launched in 2016, which is going to look at the infrared radiation given off from the earth. It is part of a suite of instruments studying clouds and aerosols in the atmosphere and which is then going to link in to investigating climate change.
“This equipment will be in space for, hopefully, three years, maybe even longer. We’re not going to the moon, we’re not sending manned space missions there, we’re not doing the big projects, but we are doing a lot more small stuff, such as telecommunications, programmes like EarthCARE, climate monitoring and weather monitoring etc. We are still sending robotic exploration probes to places like Mars, and beyond - to Jupiter and Saturn - but these programmes are not as big and showy as they once were.”
Hyam said: “OK we might not be sending people to the moon any more but that doesn’t mean that space exploration stopped in the 1970s; just recently NASA announced that it had found 461 objects that could very well be planets orbiting around other stars and four of those are very similar to the earth. We might not be able to see them from here, but there are plenty of things that you can see, if you take the trouble to look up.”
BBC 2’s Stargazing Live is hosted by Professor Brian Cox and Dara O Briain and features three nights of stargazing and discussion live from Jodrell Bank.
