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Monica’s Monthly Message DPS News February 2014 Goodness it doesn’t seem two minutes since the last newsletter but at least we are (currently) back on track with newsletter dates. This, however, does not leave me with very much to say, so I won’t say much. People Congratulations to Kathryn McDermott for successfully defending her thesis. Nicci Potts gave a talk at ESA’s ESTEC facility during the ‘Science and Challenges of Lunar Sample Return’ Meeting on 19th February. Nicci was the only student to give an oral presentation at this international meeting to discuss the future of lunar exploration. Nicci Potts was invited to present a poster on her research at a symposium for undergraduate and masters students at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. The aim was to provide students with insight to what research in planetary sciences looks like and what questions they could find themselves working on in the future, if they wished to follow a PS track. In January, I reported that a team of 16 engineers and scientists from the OU, led by Susanne Schwenzer, was taking part in the Crew 134 activities at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah. The Utah team is happy to report that the samples are back and they will start opening containers and retrieving data from the data loggers next month. In last month’s newsletter, one team member was accidentally left out, so here is the full team list: Jessica Barnes, Bruce Charlier, Monica Grady, Chris Hall, Mohit Melwani Daswani, Andrew Morse, Karen Olsson-Francis, Manish Patel, Vic Pearson, Louisa Preston, Judith Pillinger, Susanne Schwenzer, Simon Sheridan, Sarah Sherlock, Beth Steer and Sasha Verchovsky. We're hoping to make a bit of a splash with the Moons MOOC - it is the OU's first 'all singing, all dancing' MOOC (the previous one, Ecosystems, had to be presented on a less-capable platform). It begins 17 March, and we already have >5000 learners signed up. See stories at these links http://www3.open.ac.uk/media/fullstory.aspx?id=26930 http://www.open.ac.uk/research/main/node/780 lead academics are Dave Rothery, Simon Kelley and Susanne Schwenzer PhD students involved are Jess Smith - the course guide, on weekly videos Jean-David Bodénan, Catherine Hill, James Mortimer, Elena Nickson, Phillipa Smith, Beth Steer, Felicity Williams ‘Unlikely Leaders’ is among the nominations for the 2014 Learning on Screen Awards http://bufvc.ac.uk/events/learningonscreen/nominations It has been nominated under the ‘General Education – Non Broadcast’ category The pieces are Russell Brand (Dr Sarah MacKian, HSC) Sir Simon Rattle (Nicholas Logie) Maryam Bibi (Dr Richard Blundel) Nicola Adams (Ben Oakley, HoD CYS) Richard Feynman (Dr Liz Parvin) ‘Unlikely Leaders’ can be downloaded via iTunes U https://itunes.apple.com/gb/itunes-u/unlikely-leaders-for-ipad/id770878649?mt=10 Seminars We had interesting seminar talks ranging from metrology to comets to Earth formation, given by Hugo Cable, Andrew Morse and Astrid Holzheid. Next month we start with Earth again - Bernard Marty will talk about the archean atmosphere. This will be followed by Iain McDonald and Renald Schoub. Titles of the latter two to be confirmed. For more information, please see the seminar website at http://www.open.ac.uk/cepsar/seminars-lectures. Journal Club for March 12th Enda Farell 19th Adetokunbo Ayilaran JUNO/Athena SWAN update The JAS team are pleased to announce that Carole Haswell has now become co-Chair of the team, sharing responsibilities with Vic Pearson to work through the actions in the JUNO and AS submissions. The team are also looking for a successor to Elena Nickson as PhD student representative on the team. If you are interested, please contact Elena (elena.nickson) or Vic (victoria.pearson) for more information about what the role involves. Note: your supervisor must approve your involvement! A Houses of Parliament Select Committee report on Women in Scientific Careers was published at the end of February and members of the University Athena SWAN team gave both verbal and written evidence to this. Read Clem Herman’s (MCT, Chair of the University AS team) article in The Conversation about this report here. Several of our DPS action points relate to the recommendations of this report, which is good news. One of these actions relates to Equality and Diversity (E&D) training. Since 2012, the University have offered a Diversity Compliance eLearning module and expect all new staff to have completed this. However, the JAS team (with Monica’s support) strongly encourage all staff to work through this. To plagiarise the University’s Valuing Diversity website, “the module: reminds us that we have a shared responsibility in developing an inclusive culture and encourages us to reflect on our practice represents the minimum legal and organisational knowledge expected of employees by The University.” When you complete the module it will be recorded on your learning and development record, which is useful as we are also planning to monitor uptake! We’d like to see an increase from the current numbers! You can access the module via this link: Diversity Compliance e-learning module (log-in needed). Please continue to log your studentship recruitment information with Silvia and Mahesh as that fulfils a further JAS action – thanks to those that have diligently done this. EEE and LHCS are both looking to make Athena SWAN Bronze submission in November 2014. The EEE team is being led by Sarah Sherlock, and the LHCS team co-led by Rosa Hoekstra and Elaine Moore. They will be drawing very closely on the DPS experience and benefitting from a lot of ground work that the JAS team did. And finally, we now have the IoP JUNO logo included on the new DPS compliment slips! Next Institute of Physics lecture Tuesday 8th April 2014 Dr Susanne Schwenzer, The Open University The Curiosity Rover Exploration of Mars: What Have we Learnt about Mars Since landing in August 2013 we have identified the clearest evidence yet for a habitable, lacustrine environment on Mars. Using the range of instruments on the rover, including X-ray diffraction and gas chromatography, we have been able to establish some of the conditions under which water was present. The Mars Science Laboratory mission is rapidly deepening our knowledge of Mars. Funding Successes Jessica Barnes and Mohit Melwani-Daswani received travel grants from the Lunar and Planetary Institute to attend LPSC. Outreach Erika Kaufmann made her first step to international fame when she appeared in the MK Citizen, mixing snozone snow with martian analogue dirt. http://www.miltonkeynes.co.uk/news/local/will- the-snozone-snow-help-find-life-on-planet-mars-1-5889336 Colin Pillinger was interviewed by Jeremy Vine as part of his Being Human series. You can download the podcast here http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/human Axel Hagermann was interviewed briefly on the Mars Solid State Greenhouse project on BBC Radio Three. He is convinced that his enlightening performance will pave the way for a multi-hour feature programme on BBC Radio 4. Our "Sixty Second Adventures in Astronomy: black holes" cartoon was picked by the BBC's Click television programme at its video of the week: see 22'49 at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03tzbzt/Click_01_02_2014/ . Congratulations to Stephen Serjeant, Andrew Norton, Dave Rothery, Catherine Chambers (LTS) and Janet Sumner (OMU). The videos were funded by a Large Award from the Science and Technology Facilities Council. The OU stall at this year’s AstroFest, at Kensington Town Hall from 7th-8th February was a huge success. It was great to meet lots of OU students past, present & future, and we also had a visit from Dr. Brian May. The stall was staffed by: Margaret Gilroy; Christine Heading; Ulrich Kolb; Daniel Staab; Helen Davidge; Mohit Melwani-Daswani ; David Rothery; Maria Duffy; Felicity Williams; Stephen Serjeant; Victoria Pearson; Lucia Marchetti; Susanne Schwenzer; Jeronimo Bernard-Salas; Andrew McDermott; Tara Heffernan and Andrew Norton. Another successful outreach event was our "bring your kids to work" lab tours morning, held during February half term. Around 100 OU staff and their children toured various physics, astronomy, planetary and space science labs to get a taste of the research going on in the Department. The lab hosts were Liz Parvin, Marcus Brodeur, Dan Staab, Calum MacCormick, Silvia Bergamini, Natalia Pascual, Yvonne Sutton, Jean David Bodenan and Ben Dryer; and the tour guides were Tara Heffernan, Helen Davidge, Sihane Merouane, Binu Nair, Elena Nickson, Nathan Bush, Tom Barrett and Andrew Norton. Ben Dryer penned an article for The Conversation about Gaia’s progress after launch, and it was picked up by Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/esas-gaia-mission-set-to-survey-the-galaxy-with-biggest- camera-in-space/ Publications Residual stress in a laser welded EUROFER blanket module assembly using non-destructive neutron diffraction techniques. D.J. Hughes , E. Koukovini-Platia, E.L. Heeley. Fusion Engineering and Design 2014, 89, 104-108. Morphology and crystallization kinetics of polyethylene/long alkyl-chain substituted Polyhedral Oligomeric Silsesquioxanes (POSS) nanocomposite blends: a SAXS/WAXS study. Heeley, Ellen L; Hughes, Darren J.; El Aziz, Youssef; Taylor, Peter G. and Bassindale, Alan R. European Polymer Journal, 2014, 51 pp. 45–56. Social The first annual ‘Does DPS have talent?’ show took place Friday and it was decided …. DPS has a lot of talent! From tap-dancing academics to fire-throwing students – we had it all! It was amazing to see how much (non-science) talent is in the department and how much effort all the acts put into their performances! Thank you to everyone who performed and also to those who came and supported the event! There are lots of photographs on the Hooke Soc Facebook Page and here.
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