Welcome to the UCL Space Domain Newsletter. As with almost every other sector of human endeavour, the Space Sector has been profoundly impacted by Covid-19. The closure of UCL buildings (and indeed the Mullard Space Science Laboratory) together with the need for social distancing has meant that we have had to put on hold many of our planned activities including the Tour of Harwell, One O'clock Lectures, the Conference debat, a meeting of the Satellite Applications Interest Group and the first ESA_Lab Steering Committee event. Nevertheless, we are committed to keeping our community connected with the latest research opportunities at UCL as well as online lectures, virtual events, news and funding opportunities related to Space. As most of us get used to a home-based virtual world no doubt we will be as inventive as ever in creating new opportunities and developing new ideas and relationships. Moreover, in the fight to beat Covid-19 and to mitigate its impact on society and the world's economy, Space can do its part and the Space Domain is ready to provide support.
If you feel you have something to contribute or an idea you wish to explore related to Covid-19 (including its spread, public awareness, or the mitigation of its effects - short and long term) please drop an email to the Space Domain. If you're already engaged is something of this form please let us know. If collaboration with Australia in this context would be of interests please note that also. Given the breadth of UCL's Space capability I'm sure we have much to offer.
Other ways to become involved are described below.
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Covid-19's Impact on Space Sector
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ESA's continued travel ban and closing of its sites has meant a scaling down of its mission operations (for instance ESOC, its main operations centre, is virtually closed), is having a European wide impact. Most European Space Research institutes are closed although the community works on from kitchens and studies across suburban Europe. The consequences will be profound and we must expect an impact on both the exploitation of assets in space and the timescale (and cost) of current mission developments.
The UK Space Agency and UKspace trade body released a press statement on 25 March 2020 that they are working together to help the UK space sector respond to the COVID-19 pandemic by agreeing to:
- Maintain an effective flow of information between the space sector and government during the COVID-19 crisis.
- Establish dedicated teams from the UK Space Agency and UKspace to direct companies towards the support available from government.
- Identify any further actions that the government and trade body can take to minimise the disruption of COVID-19.
- Broaden the engagement with space businesses beyond members of UKspace.
UKspace and the UK Space Agency and our members are working to ensure that
- critical space enabled services remain operational;
- to find ways our members can support the national effort to fight the virus;
- helping the government take actions that will make the sector resilient to the economic challenges so it can take advantage of future opportunities once the virus has been defeated.
UK Company OneWeb, which had plans to create a constellation of hundreds of satellites in low Earth orbit to provide global internet access, has filed for bankruptcy on 27th of March over financial difficulties directly due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
NASA's response to the ongoing Covid-19 situation and further details.
While we continue to give Conference information please note that this is a very dynamic situation. No conference this year is safe from disruption and changes (postponements) are occurring every day.
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Covid-19: Ways to get involved
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Technical Research Support
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Research IT Services stands ready to support the work of UCL researchers tackling Covid-19 in whatever ways we can, whether this is storing datasets, providing compute capacity, or assisting with programming. We can do online ‘drop-in’ sessions using Microsoft Teams for researchers to ask questions. The Research Software Development Group offers extended free programming support with code review, bug fixing, speeding up simulations, etc. Please email rc-softdev@ucl.ac.uk for programming support, and rits@ucl.ac.uk for general queries or to book a drop-in slot.
List of compute resources made available to COVID here.
PRACE is a pan-European (Tier 0) supercomputing infrastructure, providing access to computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level. PRACE is welcoming project proposals requesting computing resources to contribute to the mitigation of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This applies, without being exhaustive, to the following topics:
- Biomolecular research to understand the mechanisms of the virus infection
- Bioinformatics research to understand mutations, evolution, etc.
- Bio-simulations to develop therapeutics and/or vaccines
- Epidemiologic analysis to understand and forecast the spread of the disease
- Other analyses to understand and mitigate the impact of the pandemic
This call for proposals will follow a fast track review process to provide swift feedback to the applicants. This call is open until further notice. Further details.
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New UCL study into psychological and social effects of Covid-19 has just been released.
UCL has launched a study into the psychological and social effects of Covid-19 in the UK. Researchers are aiming to recruit a large sample of adults living in the UK to help understand the effects of coronavirus and social distancing measures on individuals.
To join study and further information.
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Urgent call for modellers to support epidemic modelling
Urgent call to action is addressed to the scientific modelling community, and is a scheme to allow those with modelling skills (including data science) to contribute to current UK efforts in modelling the COVID-19 pandemic.
A willingness to work on specified tasks, and to deadlines, is needed. However, no previous experience in epidemic modelling, as such, is required of RAMP participants.
Full details of the scheme, with an online form to volunteer on behalf of your research group can be found here: https://epcced.github.io/ramp/
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UKRI open call for research and innovation ideas to address COVID-19.
Proposals are invited for short term projects addressing and mitigating the health, social, economic and environmental impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak.
There is no closing date – proposals can be submitted at any time.
UKRI will support excellent proposals of up to 18 months duration which meet at least one of the following:
- New research or innovation with a clear impact pathway that has the potential (within the period of the award) to deliver a significant contribution to the understanding of, and response to, the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts.
- Supports the manufacture and/or wide scale adoption of an intervention with significant potential
- Gathers critical data and resources quickly for future research use
Further details available on website.
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The DISCOVERER Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer integration onto SOAR CubeSat.
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Another milestone to celebrate at MSSL the DISCOVERER Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer has just left the building, on route to Denmark for integration onto the SOAR (Satellite for Orbital Aerodynamics Research) CubeSat.
A congratulations to all those involved for their hard work.
Photo credit. Martin with the unit was being removed from the thermal vacuum chamber, Andy Malpuss and Theo.
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Call for Speakers and Virtual Speakers
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The UCL Space Domain’s new 2020 bi-monthly lunchtime online webinar series is looking for Speakers in the short term (to at least September).
Our lunchtime lecture series is intended to be an informal platform for presenting on Space related topics to a general, non-specialist audience including UCL undergraduate and postgraduate students, staff members, and is open to the general public. All lectures now take place via Microsoft Teams virtually between 13:00-14:00. Time permitting, we will open up the chat for questions at the end of the lecture.
We welcome contributions related to Space Research/Projects/Competitions/Interests taking place at UCL. We are looking for either 25 minutes (in which we would have two speakers to fill the slot) or 45-50 minutes presentations.
Lectures can be very diverse, including senior academics describing their research, post docs describing recent result and students outlining an area of current interest. We particularly encourage the participation of Early Career Researchers, postgraduate students and other researchers particularly those who identify as underrepresented groups including Women, BAME, LGBT + community and differently abled individuals at UCL.
In this spirit, we would like to reach out to senior colleagues and ask them to actively encourage their Early Career colleagues, postgraduate students, independent research colleagues and/or other colleagues/students who for whatever reason may not normally feel comfortable presenting to come forward.
To be considered to speak please email an abstract of approximately 250-300 words to the organising committee.
Past One O’clock Space lectures can be found here.
Additional Requirements
If you anticipate having any additional requirements when presenting, please make us aware of these when you register. These may include accessibility, access, caring responsibilities or other additional requirements that will enable you to present.
Accessibility
It is expected that presentations and handouts adhere to Advance HE’s accessibility requirements and we will provide presenters with the relevant guidance material.
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Blogs wanted!
The Space Domain is looking for blog or video blog posts to host on our website. We are particularly interested in the following themes but welcome all topics on Space.
- Off-World Living
- ESA
- Satellite Applications
- AI and Space
We want to particularly encourage ECRs. Postgraduate students are also welcome to submit posts with the permission of their supervisors. Please email submissions.
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PhD & MSc Applications for 2020/21 now open.
MSc programmes in Space Science & Engineering, Space Risk & Disaster Reduction, Systems Engineering Management, Management of Complex Projects and Technology Management are currently accepting applications for start in 2020. Application deadline 24 July 2020. Further details on programmes.
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We are currently taking applications for our PhD studentships to start in 2020. PhDs are offered in astrophysics, solar physics, planetary physics and space plasma physics. A limited number of STFC-funded positions are available. Please see our PhD Opportunities pages for more details.
Also check out this blog post by current MSSL students about life as a postgraduate student:
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The UCL Space Domain website can now be found at
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This lecture will now be part of our new One O'clock Space Webinar series. Stay posted for a date for this lecture.
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**Postponed**
UCL-French Embassy Conférence-Débat series: Human Space Exploration
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Confirmed Speakers will be:
Romain Charles, ESA-European Astronaut Centre, will speak on: "Back from Mars - Behind the scenes of the Mars 500 mission".
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Dr Iya Whiteley, Director, Centre for Space Medicine, MSSL, UCL, will speak on: "Mission to Mars: Exploring the Human Mind".
Please stay posted for future updates about this event.
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The UCL Space Domain is looking for your best Space images to create a mosaic image of London taken from the ISS and put on our new Space Domain T-Shirts and Tote Bags. If you have a great image that encapsulates the Space Domain or the research that is going on at UCL please add it to our mosaic here.
Please note that the images will not be attributable as part of the mosaic but will be fully attributed if used in any other way.
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The SmartSat CRC is a consortium of industry and research organisations that will develop game changing technologies to bootstrap Australia’s space industry and catapult it into the 1/2 trillion dollar global economy.
SmartSat CRC has secured $245M in funding and are actively looking for research partners.
The Space Domain is keen to facilitate future research collaborations with SmartSat CRC. Please get in touch with Alan Smith with interest and proposals.
Further details: https://smartsatcrc.com/
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The Research Computing and Networking Innovation Centre (RCNIC) aims to help with the adoption of new technologies across UCL’s research computing facilities. It runs projects to evaluate, prove and incubate new technologies, which may be deployed into live service. It has two closely related objectives:
- To develop and share new knowledge and insight into leading edge research computing technologies
- To accelerate their reliable deployment into UCL’s production environments
RCNIC is a collaboration between the Research Computing teams within Research IT Services in ISD, Computer Science, and potentially research computing teams within other departments. It is funded by external grants and UCL’s Research Information and IT Services Group (RIISG), and it is overseen by the UCL eResearch Domain.
We are collecting suggestions of what technologies or IT services would you need to support research in your department’s research in the future. These suggestions and chat suggestions will form the basis of the panel discussion. Submit your ideas via Forms
Join us to find out about current projects and how you can get involved!
Speakers and panellists include:
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The Satellite Applications Catapult is one of a network of UK technology and innovation companies which aim to drive economic growth through the commercialisation of research.
Upcoming online Events and Opportunities can be found here. |
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Staff and student researchers from all disciplines are invited to complete a short online survey to share their needs and the challenges they face when using IT in their research. The feedback gathered will help towards planning and delivery of better services and support; plus, there's a chance to win a £50 voucher when you complete the survey:
IT and your research at UCL
This survey is organised by the Research IT Services department; any questions should be sent to: rits@ucl.ac.uk
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43rd Committee on Space Research now COSPAR 2021
28 January – 4 February 2021, Sydney, Australia.
http://cospar2020.org/
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European Astronomical Society Annual Meeting, Leiden, The Netherlands
29th June- 3rd July, 2020
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Global Space Exploration Conference, St. Petersburg, Russia,
1-3 September 2020
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The British Science Festival 2020, 8th -12th September 2020, Anglia Ruskin University, UK
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71st International Astronautical Congress, Dubai, 12-16 October 2020
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Global Milsatcom 2020, London, 3-5 November 2020
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