The Ariel-1, the world's first international satellite, carried experiments designed by UK universities and was built and launched by NASA.
John Zarnecki, Professor of Space Science at the OU and chair of the UK Space Agency's Science Programme Advisory Committee, said: “Ariel-1 set the standard for international collaboration in space exploration, something that is essential today in the light of the tight budgets faced by national space programmes and because of the ambitious missions undertaken by space scientists and engineers.
"Projects like Cassini-Huygens to Saturn, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency of which the UK is a major player, help us to understand how the solar system formed and evolved, and would not have been viable without international partnerships.
“On a more practical front, the Galileo constellation of European Navigation satellites currently under construction, will enable us to locate our position on Earth to unprecedented accuracy, opening up a whole new range of applications. And in two years’ time, the international Rosetta mission will arrive to land on the surface of a comet nucleus after a 10-year journey. It will carry a dust counter from Italy, a camera from Germany, a gas analyser from Switzerland... and a high-tech analytical laboratory from The Open University!”
Ian Wright, Professor of Planetary Sciences at the OU, is the Principal Investigator for the Ptolemy instrument on board the Rosetta mission, which is currently on its way to land on the surface of a comet in 2014. Ptolemy is a high-tech analytical laboratory which will process the comet sample.
The UK Space Agency is hosting a two-day conference at the Science Museum on 26 and 27 April and Professor Zarnecki will attend as a speaker.
