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I completed my registration as a STEM ambassador today, to help promote Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths to school age audiences. I look forward to helping out at both the UKSEDS (UK Students for Exploration & Development of Space) and the Kennedy Space Visitors Centre stands at the national Big Bang Fair at the London Excel centre, 14-17th March 2013.

My team mate from Alpbach, Ingo Gerth, and his friend Roy Bijster who I met at SpaceUp EU, have set up Vis Viva, a society for space professionals where they are based in Delft, Holland.

Their first event was streamed live online today and the recording can be viewed here.  Their guests were Dr Susana Direito, discussing detection of life on Mars, the amazing Dr Adam Steltzner talking about the engineering of the entry, descent and landing of MSL ‘Curiosity’ via Skype from NASA JPL, and Professor Bernard Foing, expert of Mars analogue research, which particularly interested me given my involvement with the Austrian Space Forum Mars analogue mission this year.

From 7th to 16th February 2013, I volunteered as part of the Remote Science Support team for the Austrian Space Forum’s Mars simulation mission, being carried out in Morocco for the entire month of February. My experiment MEDIAN was being operated by the field team of 10 people, and I was involved with the in-house mapping and geological projects, as well as helping to co-ordinate data from the field being sent out to remote experiment teams. Around 18 experiments were conducted and over 100 people from 23 different countries were involved in the mission.

MEDIAN in Morocco (c) OeWF (Katja Zanella-Kux)

Thanks to Natalie Jones, a fellow RSS team member, on the first day of the official mission we enjoyed a phone call from Commander Chris Hadfield, live from the International Space Station, which was also patched through to the field as a total surprise.

The Austrian Space Forum published a profile interview with me and after the first fortnight, an update about MEDIAN was featured in the first mission science bulletin.

The second mission science bulletin contained information about our detailed photogeologic mapping project, masterminded by Anna Losiak.  I was part of the Remote Science Support team who worked on this in detail, which involved layering optimised maps for the different experiments in order for flight planning to make daily mission plans, and then plotting what was actually carried out by the field in order to compare the planned and actual results, and the reasons for differences.

It was an amazing experience to be involved in a full mission simulation and the level of detail and professionalism achieved was outstanding.

This “10th Annual Early Career Researcher’s Meeting” took place at the Natural History Museum, London, where 15 early career scientists presented their latest work in 20 minute presentations.

I got involved by presenting my team’s Alpbach work in the UKPF poster session, showing our Uranus mission proposal, and enjoyed an interesting afternoon meeting PhD students and finding out more about other peoples work at different institutions.

I was honored when a good friend invited me to Mark Thompson’s book launch, held at the Royal Astronomical Society.  It was a pleasure to meet Mark, who is from Norwich like me, and it was a lovely evening. His book is now available from Amazon.

Mark Thompson, Stargazing Live

The European Space Solutions conference at Central Hall Westminster, was introduced by the UK Space Agency, and then handed over to Antonio Tajani, Vice-President of the European Commission, responsible for Industry and Entrepreneurship. He was followed by the Rt Hon David Willetts MP, Minister of State for Universities and Science.

David Willetts, MP, and Antonio Tajani, Vice-President of the EC

Richard Branson joined the conference by video link, talking about growth in the space sector and space business today.

Sir Richard Branson

Me

I was extremely pleased to be selected as one of fifteen students from the original sixty at the Alpbach Summer School, to attend the Post-Alpbach follow up workshop in Graz.

We had all been on different teams previously in July, so we came together to work on one mission, expanding our research in more detail in establishing a viable Uranus mission proposal.

We are continuing to work on finalising a paper for publication and the team will be presenting this work as a poster at the Lunar & Planetary Science Conference, Houston in March and at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly, Vienna in April.

Post-Alpbach Team, Photo credit Ingo Gerth

Elon Musk gave a great talk at the Royal Aeronautical Society, shortly after the October successful launch of his Falcon rocket and flight of the Dragon capsule on the first official resupply mission to the International Space Station.

Me with Elon Musk