Rocket scientist takes career woman award

Wednesday 8 July 2009

The award, sponsored by Shell, is aimed at recognising early career women working in physics-related fields and highlighting how their skills, ambition and desire to inspire others in to physics-related pursuits are already bearing fruit.

Victoria Hodges works for Astrium Ltd. She is currently working on GAIA, one of the European Space Agency’s cornerstone projects, due to be launched in 2012, which all involved hope, once construction is completed, will be able to map the billion or so stars in our galaxy and the local group. You can hear her interview here.

Vicki explained her work at the event, “Once the satellite is in space its position and orientation has to be controlled, a bit like driving a car, but it’s not possible or desirable to do this in real-time. You have to make the spacecraft autonomous to overcome the gap between sending a signal and the satellite receiving it, while this is only around 5 seconds for Gaia, this is a long period of time for a spacecraft! A big part of my team’s challenge is being able to control the satellite accurately to within less than a degree (and in some phases of the mission less than a few arcseconds!) of the desired orientation – imagine trying to control the line along which you drive a car on the road to this level of accuracy!”