My name is Monica Grady and I'm Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at The Open University. The OU is really, reallywell placed to offer a Masters in Space Sciences. The OU specialises insupported distance learning, so you're not doing it by yourself. And the staff who are involved in this Masters, we've all been involved in space missions. We've been involved in the design and the build of instruments,in the interpretation of the data that comes from it, and so we know what it's like to be part of those teams and we really want to convey thatinterest and that excitement to the people who are going to follow in ourfootsteps, who are actually going to be part of the next set of space missions. Hello, I'm Mark Jones. I'm a Senior Lecturer at The Open University and I'm the academic lead for the new Masters in Space Science and Technology, and I'malso the module team chair for our new Masters level module on Space Science. I'm an astronomer and all my research has been based on observations made from space-based platforms, so I've worked on x-ray infrared observatories over 20years or so.
The Masters in Space Science and Technology is designed for peoplewho want to either seek employment in the space sector or to go on to dofurther academic research in the space sector. It's designed for people from awide range of backgrounds, mainly from physical science backgrounds,but also from geology or chemistry or engineering or mathematics, and it seeksto build up not only the knowledge that you need to work in the spacesector but also to develop the skills that are sought by employers in the space sector. The qualification is split into three parts, three stages. So the first stage isan Introduction to Space Science which gives students the background about theprinciples of making physical measurements in the space environmentand using case studies to illustrate those points very, very clearly.The second stage is to do with the development of professional skills thatare important in the space sector and those are split into technical skills, suchas programming or other engineering-related skills, and the otherprofessional development that we have at the second stage is really to do withproject management or technology management.
The third stage isto conduct a project, an academic project in space science or space technology under the supervision of a tutor in an area that's of interest tothe student. The unique feature about the Masters program is that the Introduction to Space Science is based on a case study approach using four missions that we have experience of, and three of those missions with directacademic experience of academic members of staff at The Open University, so they bringtheir academic expertise to actually illustrate how space missions really work. My role in the Masters course is the responsibility for the chunk of thecourse about the Rosetta mission to a comet. The OU's involvement in theRosetta mission was to build an instrument called Ptolemy which was onthe Philae lander. It took about 10 years to design and build the instrument, andthen it took 10 years for the Rosetta spacecraft to get to the comet beforePhilae was launched.
The idea of the instrument was to sniff the gases whichwere coming from the nucleus of the comet. Of course the Rosetta mission isnot the only mission that The OU's been involved in. In the past we were involvedin the Beagle 2 mission to Mars; we were the leading partner for that. And also wewere involved in the Huygens part of the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn.Currently, as well as the Rosetta mission we're involved in Gaia, which is mappingall the stars, and in the future we're going to be involved in doing somethingfor missions to the moon; we're also involved in the Euclid space telescope;we're involved in the ExoMars mission to Mars, two parts of the mission: thetrace gas orbiter and also the lander. So there's loads of stuff still to come. My name's Andrew Norton. I'm Professor of Astrophysics Education here at The OU, and on the Space Science Masters I'm working on one of the particular casestudies on the Gaia Satellite. So my particular area ofresearch is in astronomy, and in particular what you might call timedomain analysis. So I'm looking at how stars and galaxies and so on, how theirlight output varies with time.
This is an area of big data that's increasinglybecoming important in astronomy. So something like the Gaia Satellite whichwe're including in the Space Science Masters, that will continually scan thesky for years at a time, measuring the brightness; measuring the positions; measuring the spectra of millions and millions of stars. From that we can extract all sortsof information, and that's the sort of thing I'm interested in. How stars varywith time; whether they're multiple stars orbiting around each other; whetherthey're stars that are pulsating in and out; whether they're stars that undergotransient events flaring up or exploding. And the sort of things we'regoing to do in the Space Science Masters really completely fit in with the sortof research I'm doing in time domain astronomy. The Space Science module that introduces the Masters program will make a lot of use of remoteexperimentations.
We have an Open STEM laboratory here with experimental kits that are relevant to space science, and students will be operating that kitover the internet and doing real physical measurements as part of theirstudies. Students will be controlling experiments here at The OU over the internet, whether that's laboratory equipment such as electron microscopesor particle detectors; whether it's robotic telescopes either here or inTenerife. We even have a robotic Mars Rover in a Mars shed over there wherewe have a Martian landscape in our shed, and students will control and drive thisMars Rover on the simulated landscape to do experiments as if they werecontrolling the real Rover on Mars. We're also going to focus the Space Science Masters on certain skills that will particularly involve teamwork. Just as ina real space mission, our students will have to work together, collaborate in ateam to achieve the outcomes.
We will also include scientific computer programmingin the Space Science Masters, because for all these space science projectswhen the data comes back you have to write computer programs tounderstand and analyse those data, so we will teach Python Programming in theSpace Science Masters so that our students can analyse space weather data; so that they can analyse data on transient astronomical objects comingdown from the Gaia Satellite. All of these sort of data projects are vitalfor space science and we're going to be training the students to do exactly that. We expect students who qualify with the Masters in Space Science and Technology will be well equipped to obtain employment in the space sector. There isa growth in the space sector at the moment, particularly in terms of what'scalled downstream applications, that's using space-based data, and our Mastersqualification has an emphasis on the use of data obtained in the spaceenvironment. Alternatively, students might go on to follow a more research or academic career path, and we think that this Masters will set up people very wellfor PhD level research in space science.