Exhibition: OU Research at 50

Space Research at the OU

In 1983, a planetary science research group arrived at The Open University from Cambridge, led by Professor Colin Pillinger. This group - and others connected with it - was to become one of the most globally-recognised research units within the OU. There have been a few name-changes over the years, but perhaps the most familiar incarnation was the Planetary & Space Science Research Institute (PSSRI) – and Professor Pillinger became the very public face of space research at the University.

In the 1990s, when the unit was called PSRI (Planetary Sciences Research Institute), they received news coverage for their work analysing Martian meteorites. Then, on 1st July 2000, the PSRI merged with their colleagues in USSA (Unit for Space Sciences and Astrophysics) based at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) to form what OU publicity at the time dubbed “an interdisciplinary supergroup”!

Professor Pillinger was the principal investigator on Beagle 2, a lander included in the European Space Agency’s 2003 mission known as Mars Express. The image on this page shows him with a model of the lander. The media coverage of the mission, both before and after the problematic landing of Beagle 2, made it an extremely high-profile project.

In 2004, Professors Carole Haswell and Andrew Norton were co-founders of the SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) programme which has discovered over 100 extrasolar planets using two robotic observatories which operate continuously.

Professor John Zarnecki was part of the team who arrived from UKC in 2000, and was principal investigator on designing the Surface Science Package (SSP) for the Huygens probe sent to Saturn’s moon Titan as part of the Cassini-Huygens mission. In the clip on this page Professor Zarnecki describes and demonstrates a number of the instruments included on the SSP, which landed on Titan in January 2005. This was the first – and so far only – probe to make a landing in the outer Solar System.