Solar Orbiter, Building an Instrument to Study the Sun

Date: Tuesday 8 December 2020

Time: 18:50 - 20:00

Venue: Event will be hosted online. This year due to the constraints of Covid-19 our Annual Christmas Lecture will be Live Streamed. We hope to see you face-to-face again in 2021.

Social media: Please use #IMechEChristmas when discussing this event on social media

Join us for our annual family-friendly evening of fun, facts and physics about how our star creates and controls the giant bubble of plasma that surrounds the whole Solar System and influences the planets within it.

Programme

Live Stream opens 18:50 for Lecture start at 19:00

Lecture concludes at 20:00

Speaker Information and Abstract

Mrs Chris Brockley-Blatt, BEng(Hons) CEng FIMechE, Project Manager of the Solar Wind Analyser instrument on Solar Orbiter.

Our fun and interactive family lecture will outline the science behind Solar Orbiter, describe more of the mission and the spacecraft, present the Solar Wind Analyser (SWA) and describe the engineering behind building a space science instrument. Our guest speaker will engage with her virtual audience utilising experiments to demonstrate her findings and is very much looking forward to sharing the Solar Wind Analyser journey with you.

After leaving School, Chris took a year out to work as a Student Apprentice with Dowty Aerospace, who sponsored her through university. Upon leaving university with a BEng in Mechanical Engineering, Chris worked for Ricardo Consulting Engineers, as a design analyst and thermal engineer. After six years there, she made the move to Mullard Space Science Laboratory as a Mechanical and Thermal Design Engineer and Project Manager, where she continues to work. She was chartered in 1998 and became a Fellow in 2009.

Chris was the project manager for the structure of the infra-red space instrument SPIRE on the Herschel Space Telescope and for the 50mK ADR space cooler project. She has just finished leading an International consortium as Project manager to provide the Solar Wind Analyser instrument, for the ESA Solar Orbiter mission. She is currently Project Manager for the VIS Instrument on the Euclid space telescope currently under development by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Euclid Consortium. More about Chris and her Solar Orbiter work can be found here.

Registration

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