6:30pm Club Meeting & Dinner

Tue, Mar 3rd 2015 at 12:00 am - 12:00 am

Our guest speaker this evening is the distinguished Susan McKenna-Lawlor, Emeritus Professor at Maynooth University. Susan is playing a critical role in the Rosetta mission which recently landed a probe on the Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P) comet.


Susan McKenna_Lawlor is Emeritus Professor at Maynooth University. She is also founder and Managing Director of Space Technology Ireland Ltd (STIL) which builds instrumentation for space missions. She has been involved with various experiments flown on European Space Agency, NASA as well as Chinese, Indian and Russian Space Agency missions.

Her presentation will cover the very exciting Rosetta mission, a robotic space probe, launched in 2004 which landed on the 67P comet last November. An astonishing achievement considering the comet is 520 million kms from earth and travelling 40 times faster than a speeding bullet while spinning furiously!

For Rosetta, her company designed, constructed and tested the onboard Electrical Support System (ESS). This system plays a key role in passing commands and data between the Rosetta spacecraft and the instruments on the Lander probe. Since the success of the Lander depends on the successful acquisition of scientific data from the comet nucleus, the ESS is mission critical hardware. Unfortunately, the Lander 'bounced' on landing and is currently in the shadow of a rockface and without sunlight to power it's cells, is in hibernation. There is a small chance the Lander will get some sunlight later this year as the comet nears the sun. In the meantime the Rosetta spacecraft continues to collect valuable data as it conducts fly-bys. 

By gathering information from the comet, it is hoped that the Rosetta mission will provide important insights into the formation of our solar system. "Comets have preserved a record of the early history of the solar system some 4.6bn years ago because they spend almost all of their lifetime in a 'deep freeze' at about one light year distance from the sun," says McKenna-Lawlor. "Due to a chance gravitational wobble a comet can be deflected into the inner solar system. It is very exciting to have such a unique opportunity to study materials that drove the evolution of the solar system."

We're looking forward to a fascinating evening.

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