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A RECENT Aurora fellowship confirms Dr Manish Patel is becoming one of Britain’s leading researchers into the Martian surface environment.
The award from the STFC, linked in to the European Space Agency’s long-term programme to explore the Solar System, is one of a series of highlights in a career that currently sees Manish prepare a spectrometer to measure the sunlight on the Red Planet.
“It is mindblowing,” said Manish, who became a research assistant at the OU after gaining his PhD here in 2003. “My dad used to have a telescope and he and I would look at the stars and planets – and now I’m designing an instrument that is actually going to Mars. I realised that this was what I wanted to do when I visited the Star City Space Camp in Moscow as a 15-year-old. But I’ve been very fortunate to get the opportunities I have.”
Arguably the most significant opportunity was being in the OU’s Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute when the department was preparing to launch Beagle 2 to Mars. “I was involved in the Environmental Sensor Suite team on that,” says Manish, “and that was a great experience. But the ExoMars spectrometer which I’m working on now is something I dreamed up whilst working on Beagle 2”.
Manish currently works in PSSRI preparing instruments to measure the weather and sunlight – on a surface where the atmosphere is 0.006% that on Earth – which will be fitted on the ESA ExoMars mission to launch in 2013. “It sounds a long way off but the individual processes leading up to it are very short,” he says. “There’s a lot of theoretical modelling and hardware development and we have to deliver results every year.
“But space exploration is a long-term process. I’m already also working on the next logical place to look for life – a moon of Jupiter – even though that mission isn’t likely to happen for 20 years! The groundwork starts now.”
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Manish is committed to the OU in more ways than one – he’s currently doing an MBA course.
“But outside academic work I suppose you could call my main hobby DIY,” he says. “Oh, and I’ve got an old MG in the garage that I’ve been doing up for years. I guess you could say I just like taking things apart and putting them back together again.”
Key Dates
1977 Elvis dies, and I am born. Coincidence, I think not...
1981 Heard that Bob Marley had died - my earliest lucid memory
1990 Run the hurdles in the county finals - badly
1992 Travel to Star City, Moscow for astronaut training
1993 See Jim Robinson from Neighbours at Victoria Station
1994 Get my first car - a Triumph Spitfire
1995 A levels from John Ruskin College
1998 Drive all the way across America, and drown in a lake
1999 MPhys in Physics with Space Science at Kent University
2002 Publish my first research paper
2003 PhD in Planetary Science at the OU
2003 My instrument on Beagle 2 crashes on Mars
2005 Go to ESA Mission Control to see the Huygens probe land on Titan
2007 Awarded an Aurora Fellowship for Planetary Research
