Category Archives: School-University Engagement

Mercury: new views on the Sun’s most innermost planet

Posted on by
Prof. David Rothery, The Open Univeristy, delivering his lecture

Prof. David Rothery, The Open University, delivering his lecture. Photo: Kate Bradshaw

I’m a geologist who now works mostly on other worlds, and the one that is keeping me busiest at present is Mercury. This is the closest planet to the Sun, which means that is always much closer to Earth than Jupiter ever gets.

However, it is harder to study because the Sun’s glare makes it difficult to observe with telescopes, and the Sun’s gravity poses an enormous challenge if you want to get a spacecraft into orbit about Mercury.

NASA achieved this with its MESSENGER orbiter (2011-2015), and I’m on the science team for the European Space Agency’s BepiColombo orbiter 2024-2025, due for launch in later 2016.

2015 Science Matters Lecture
I recently introduced school students, teachers and members of the public from Milton Keynes to my research at the 2015 Science Matters lectures.

You can watch a recording of my talk below.

Continue reading →

Code-breaking challenges

Posted on by
Mairi Walker, The Open University

Mairi Walker, The Open University

Late last year, pupils from St Paul’s Catholic School in Milton Keynes gathered only 3 miles away from Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing famously cracked the Enigma code during the Second World War, to take part in their own code-breaking challenge.

Small teams of Year 9 pupils battled it out in a series of tasks requiring them to decrypt secret messages as quickly as possible.

The event was organised by me and my fellow Open University maths PhD student and STEM Ambassador, David Martí Pete. We were aiming to give pupils a broader sense of what maths is really about: solving problems.

Continue reading →

MK students are go for launch…

Posted on by
Dr Leanne Gunn, The Open University

Dr Leanne Gunn, The Open University

Following the success of last year’s competition, July 2014 once again saw bottle rockets launching from the school field of Denbigh Teaching School in Milton Keynes.

Four teams of six year 9 students, each representing a different Milton Keynes school competed on the day to build two successful rockets 2 litre plastic bottles and simple craft materials.

I was working on the competition as one of the organisers, working with a team that included: Richard Holliman, Ben Dryer, Vic Pearson, and Diane Ford from the Open University, Mark Russell and Val Hawthorne from Denbigh Teaching School, and Jessica Carr who was working as an intern.

Here’s how the day went…

Continue reading →