Visiting professor role in the Arctic

I am pleased to have a good reason to return to the far north of Europe!

Over 20 years ago I led a team at Newcastle University developing the onboard data handling system for a pan-European student designed and built satellite, a project initiated by the Education Office at ESA. We collaborated with a similar team of students at Luleå Tekniska Universitet who worked on the data interfaces, digital harness using CANbus (long before it became popular for cubesats - and long before the uptake of SpaceWire), and real time software.

(BIG shout out to the LTU team from those days - Andreas Isaksson and Johan Lindell are those I'm connected to here).

Thanks to the global phenomenon that is Rene Laufer for inviting me - always fun to collaborate with, and that is closing another time-loop because we also worked together for the first time almost 20 years ago in Strasbourg. Perhaps the planet is actually getting smaller...

In most of my career since those student days I have been involved in the end-to-end responsibility for data delivery, processing, transformation, and top level system interfaces - for projects and missions including projects that flew - Beagle-2, Herschel, Planck, and Gaia - and many others that did not.

This semester I have returned to Kiruna’s Space Campus – nearby the Esrange operational site – as visiting professor to lead teaching of a course on Onboard Data Handling systems for 3 degree programmes, including the SpaceMaster. So, some kind of karmic cycle has been closed.

The course has started near the end of the only 3 months in the year when the region is not covered with snow, so it looks very different to how I remember it. By the time we reach the revision class before the exam – the world here will be again completely white, with the dark green of the endless forests peeking through.

Due to the curious way that Sweden organises its degree programmes, this is a very short-lived exercise. While I love the far north, I am open to opportunities to teach in other beautiful places 😉