Work at MSSL

Me

I work for Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London on the XMM Optical Monitor, part of the European Space Agency's XMM Newton orbiting observatory and UVOT part of NASA's Swift Gamma Ray Burst observatory.

Before this I was working for my PhD on X-ray astronomy. (See Papers list).

XMM Optical Monitor

XMM is an orbiting X-ray and UV-optical observatory which looks at astronomical X-ray sources such as this (artist's impression of a) cataclysmic variable:

mini CV pic by Dr Mark Garlick

(click for a larger image - if you want to see more of Mark's work go visit Dr. Mark Garlick).

ariane5
XMM was launched on ArianeSpace's Ariane 5 launcher.

Swift UVOT

Swift is an orbiting Gamma Ray Burst observatory with a gamma ray, X-ray and UVOT-optical telescope.

Software

For XMM OM and Swift UVOT software, I use Suns, PCs and VME with Solaris, RedHat (and Fedora Core) Linux and VxWorks. Plus lots of GNU utilities and other languages such as Perl.

I program in C, Ada and MA1750A Assembler. In the development environment I use Gnu C, GNU utilities and the Tartan Ada compiler (The Tartan compiler are now owned by DDC-I).

Optical Monitor World tour

For the last integration we took the XMM OM equipment to the USA for tests. While we were there we drove from New Mexico to California stopping at lots of good places along the way.

OM has since been tested in Belgium, delivered to Germany and launched from Kourou, French Guiana.

Swift UVOT has been delivered to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, USA and launched from Cape Canaveral.