Donagh O’Mahony: Thanks everybody. First of all, you are very welcome here for my talk here today. I am going to try to give you an overview of some of the work I and my colleagues have been doing in the Tyndall National Institute, which is in Cork. It’s an institute which is part of UCC. And we do a lot of different areas of scientific research and device development. But one of the strongest areas over the last few years has been in the development of technologies for space.
So when I was approached to do this talk I thought I would try and give you an overview of what we do. And as well maybe give you an insight into the type of basic challenges that are out there when you want to get something up into space. And hopefully as well make you realise that space technology isn’t as ‘far out’ as we all think. It’s something that we can get involved. And it’s something that Irish companies and research institutes have got involved in in the past. And if any of you have an interest in either science or electronics or astrophysics, or the whole space area in general, I would advise you to just think twice about it. And hopefully today you will see that it’s an area that there is a lot of potential out there if you want to pursue a career in it.
OK, so the talk overview is going to look something like this. [Slide: Overview] I am going to start off with a few, what I call ‘space technology myths’. They are preconceptions or misconceptions that I think the general public have, and probably what I had myself before I started into this area a few years ago. I’ll move on then to what are the critical space technology challenges. You know, what are the real problems you have to overcome to get up into space and keep something going up in space? I’ll move on to developing and testing space technology in Ireland. I’m sure there is a lot of areas here you are not familiar with. So hopefully you will be surprised and encouraged by what is going on in Ireland in the whole space technology sector. We will move on then to technologies that are…they were initially developed for space but they have actually come back down to earth. They are everyday technologies that are being put to very good use. And finally we will look at what I call life and space, or career options. If somebody wants to go down this line there are more options than you might think. OK, to start off with, I found this picture a few days ago. And it really amazed me. Anybody want to take a guess at what it represents? [Photo: ‘Space Junk’ orbiting the Earth]
Audience: [unclear]
Donagh O’Mahony: It’s what’s called ‘space junk’. There’s 12,000 pieces of junk or technology – whichever way you want to look at it – going around the Earth at the moment at different distances from the Earth, satellites, pieces of satellites, pieces of rockets that fell off. Lots of them do very useful things but some of them don’t do anything. So we have got 12,000 pieces of junk floating around the Earth at the moment. Most of them will stay floating. Some of them might get caught in freefall and end up back down on Earth. What I hope it would just represent here is, there is a lot going on in the whole space technology sector, even though 30, 40 years ago was the first time we actually put something up into space, there’s a lot going on since.
The second one, this is the only piece of business I am going to show here today, the only facts and figures. It’s a pie chart representing the amount of money that is being spent in the space industry at the moment. [Slide: Pie Chart of Space Budgets] That’s the total - €257 billion. It’s a massive amount of money. It’s mostly being spent for one country by the American government. "International governments" is much smaller in comparison. But you look here, two thirds of the total budget is being spent by the commercial sector. And what that means is companies putting satellites up into space for everything from satellite TV to mobile phones, etc. What I just wanted to get across is, this is really big. There’s an awful lot of money being spent on space today. NAV is only €70 billion. They are spending €250 billion a year on space. So when you take that into mind, space is big business.
Let’s look at a few technology myths, as I call them, that are out there at the moment. First one, space technology is futuristic nonsense. In other words, when you think of space technology what comes to mind first? Star Trek probably. You know, Deep Space Nine, whatever you want, spaceships going outside the solar system. I am going to try and show you that, no, people have been thinking about space for a very long time. Secondly, space technology is not for the ordinary Joe. In other words, when we think of space technology we think again of the kind of whole Star Trek idea. And that all this technology is no use to you and me. But in fact it is. Number three, space technology is just a few crazy scientists locked away in a few labs, in NASA or the European Space Agency or whatever, developing crazy little technologies that are of no use to anybody. And again I think we will show that that’s not the case, at least most of the time. And finally Ireland and space. At least up to recently most people would have laughed at the idea of Ireland doing anything for space. But hopefully you’ll be surprised and encouraged when you see that there is a lot going on in Ireland as regards space technology development.
So the first one, space technology is a load of futuristic nonsense. And as I said, this is what we think of when space technology comes into our minds. Star Trek, guys in dodgy clothes, firing lasers, tele-transporting, whatever. But when I started to think about this I said, OK, who was the first person to actually use a piece of technology and interact with space to help improve their lifestyle or whatever. And Google, my good friend, came up with this. [Slide: Oldest Star Chart and Oldest Star Map] 32,000 BC, the first star chart, found in Germany, in a cave in Germany. And similarly in France somebody was already drawing up stars and looking at the night sky. And obviously he was…maybe he was totally bemused by it, but he was starting to think, OK, maybe there is something we can use out of this. So a bit dubious as to whether that’s space technology. But definitely as we move on, and this is something we should all know about, Newgrange and the megalithic chambers that are in Meath, mostly in Meath, but some more around the country. But the most impressive of them are places like Newgrange and Knowth and Dowth. And what they had been doing is, they had been using the Sun to tell them what time of year it was. And Newgrange, even up to this day, will tell you what is the shortest day of the year within a day or two. And that was extremely useful back then. I mean they could plan their whole year around it. Their lifestyle was based around agriculture. So once they know what the shortest day in the year was, they could start planting their crops or whatever and start planning for the year. Even back then people were thinking, ‘OK, I am going to use space for something and that’s going to help my lifestyle.’
As we move on in time, people started to use the Sun and the stars to navigate, to get places. There is evidence that maybe St Brendan travelled to America, to the New World, by looking at the Sun and the stars. Definitely by the medieval times and the mid 1100s, the turn of the century or the first century of the first millennia, people were using devices to look at the Sun, look at the stars, and tell them where in the world they were. And they could navigate to new countries. More recently in the 1600-1700s people were starting to develop telescopes. They were actually looking at extraterrestrial bodies. The big jump happened after the Second World War really. People started launching rockets up into space. And now I mean we have gone outside our own solar system, the Hubble telescope is looking at galaxies outside the solar system. And we have gone all the way into the Sun. We have had orbiters going around the Sun. And man, of course, has gone to the Moon in 1969. And we’ve got a space station up there. The bottom line is we have gone all the way from just looking at the Sun and the stars to where we have got to a stage where we can travel to another planet, the Moon or a satellite planet. And in 2016 the European Space Agency is actually going to send a satellite to orbit the Sun. It will be one of the most advanced pieces of technology ever developed. So we have really come a long way. And I have put down, if anybody is interested, take a brief look at how the whole concept of space evolved, I would recommend taking a look at this book, "The Sleepwalkers" by Arthur Koestler. [Slide: Evolution of Space Technology]
OK, space myth number two – space technology is not for the ordinary man or woman in the street. When we think of space technology again we are thinking Star Trek. It’s of no use to us. We are thinking Space Shuttles. But, when you think about it, could we live without satellite TV? Who here can get by without Sky Sports or Eurosport or whatever? We have got lots of stuff coming in on cable now, but I am sure everybody has their satellite dish up. GPS or SatNav – every taxi you get into now, they type in where you want to go, they have a picture up there. And I mean you can see here, this is a SatNav image of the Science Gallery. [Slide: SatNav Image: Science Gallery] You can see down to, you know, you can see people walking along the streets. It’s frightening in some ways. Satellite weather images – do we want to go back to that? Definitely not. Again we have these fantastic images of the weather that can tell us what’s coming in in the next few days, even in Ireland. And that’s all down to having satellites up there and looking at the weather systems. Sat phones, it’s not such a big issue in Ireland. But if you’re stuck out in a desert somewhere and your mode of transport breaks down, your jeep breaks down, having a sat phone could be the difference between life and death. And that’s because there’s a satellite up there that you can connect to and call someone for help. In the future space tourism will probably be the next big thing. Instead of going to Australia or New Zealand you guys will be saving up to go to the Moon or taking a trip up into space. Projections are by 2030 there will be five million passengers per year. So start saving. The bottom line is, could we live without space technology? We probably could. But we’ve got so used to it by now, it would probably be quite hard.
OK, space myth number three – space technology, it’s comprised of scientists locked away in their labs developing crazy gizmos that are no use to anybody. And things like Star Trek again don’t help that, when you think of the concepts that they are trying to come up with. But that’s not true. When it comes down to it, space is comprised of three basic challenges. And they are: power, control and reliability. You need the power to get up into space. You need the control to be able to control whatever you’ve put up there. And you need reliability to make sure that once it’s up there it’s going to keep working for a long time, because you can’t take it to the garage or whatever. You’re not going to fix it. Once it’s up there it has got to work for a very long time. It has cost enough to get up there. So it’s got to work very well.
I am going to start with number one – the power challenge. And this was a challenge that limited how man could interact with space for so long. They basically couldn’t get anything outside the Earth’s orbit. And that’s because of gravity. And you might be familiar with this equation. [Slide: Newton’s Law of Gravitation] And if not you probably will be in the next few years. It’s Newton’s Law of Gravitation. Basically what it says is, if you have two massive bodies they will attract each other, and the magnitude of the force of attraction is proportional to how much mass is there, how big they are. And it’s inversely proportional to how far they are separated. So the Earth is a huge mass, so it attracts everything to it. And that’s how we are all standing solid on the Earth. And to escape the Earth’s gravitational field you need an absolutely huge velocity. This is known as the ‘Escape Velocity’. [Slide: Escape Velocity] And that’s a summary of how you work it out. But the actual magnitude of it, for a rocket to escape the Earth’s gravity, it’s 11.2k/sec. And that is really a huge velocity when you think about it. Jumbo jets fly at less than 1k/sec. So you’ve got to go 10 times faster. So you have got to accelerate, accelerate, accelerate, until you get to that speed. And once you hit that 11.2k/sec you are gone. You can get out of the Earth’s orbit.
To actually get out of there, of course the big technology development was a rocket. And ironically that came out of one of the world’s greatest historical tragedies, World War II. The Nazi regime in Germany had just developed the rocket at the end of World War II and it was put to good use by the Russians when they sent the first rocket up in 1946. [Slide: Picture taken from first rocket launch] That’s the first picture taken from a rocket from space in 1946. [Slide: V2 rocket] And that’s the V2 rocket. So that was a huge step. That meant we could escape the Earth. So now at least we are up there. Once you are up there you have got to consider, OK, how are we going to power it? How are we going to keep things going? And again that was an issue, because you can’t be bringing tanks of petrol up into space. You know, it’s just too messy, it’s weight. Every kilogram of weight in the space industry costs about a quarter of a million to get it off the ground. So you don’t want fuels, you want something light that you can put out there. And it was solar cells that enable that. Silicon solar cells were discovered in the 1950s. And they were actually very inefficient. They only give you about 10% of the light that hits us. A silicon solar cell is converted to electrical energy. The rest is wasted as heat. So people thought, OK, what use are these things? But, of course, in space the Sun is directly shining on you the whole time. There’s no day or night. It’s daytime the whole time. And you’ve got an endless supply of energy. So that enabled technology to work in space.
So the second challenge was control. Do you remember, I said there was three challenges, control, power and reliability. So once you are up there, you have got to think, OK, how am I going to control this thing? I have got it outside Earth’s orbit. How am I going to tell the rocket to turn left, turn right, to look at the Sun, to look at some star? And the reason is it’s just so far away. I have just done a little calculation here. If you were travelling at 1,000 kilometres an hour - that’s 10 times faster than the speed limit - it would take you 16 days to get to the Moon, years to get to Mars. You know, it’s mind-boggling really. But technology has got so far that they can do this. They can talk to them. And they still are. [Slide: Picture of NASA’s Pioneer Satellite] This is Pioneer. This was a satellite that was put up in 1968. And it’s still actually transmitting. So that shows you the level of technology advancement that’s been achieved. And this has been enabled by wireless technology and wireless transmitters. Basically it’s been mobile phone technology. It started off as radar, radio wave communications. It is becoming more and more towards the millimetre and microwave technologies. And that’s what we use now every day in our mobile phones. Again now you can get something up there, you can control it.
The next challenge is reliability. How are you going to be sure it’s going to work? And there’s a number of reliability challenges. First you’ve got to get over the whole reliability issue of getting off the ground. It’s a huge challenge. You’ve got to go at very high accelerations. There’s actually a demonstration out here downstairs. There is an astronaut talking about what it’s like to go up into space and the lift-off. And he says, ‘You know, when you hit 3G, 4G times gravity, your whole body is just being crushed.’ And he said, ‘You know, you come to the top of the lift-off and you just want it to stop.’ And this is a picture of somebody going down a rollercoaster. [Slide: Person on Rollercoaster] And you can see how their face is distorted. So you could imagine when you are going up at this kind of acceleration it’s shocking. And vibration as well, you know, things are just shaking around so much. You’re driving so much power out of the rocket. You’re burning hydrogen and oxygen. And if there is any weak link it could be the end of the whole mission.
And in the case of let’s say Challenger – I don’t know if you guys are too young to remember – but Challenger in 1986, it was a very very minute detail. There was a little seal, a rubber seal, that had a crack in it. And that ended in the hydrogen leaking out, exploded, rockets destroyed and the crew killed. So you’ve just got to be extra diligent. More and more, the reliability challenge comes to extreme environments. Because now people want to go to different planets. They want to go to the Moon. They want to go to Mars. They want to go to Venus, Mercury. And then you’ve got to think about, OK, these planets are completely different environment to Earth. They don’t have oxygen. Some of them don’t…most of them yet, they don’t have oxygen. But they have some really nasty atmospheres like ammonia, methane – it’s highly explosive – and hydrosulphide – really awful stuff. It would rust away most electronics and materials that we commonly use.
And the temperatures are very extreme as well. If you want to go way out to the edge of the solar system it gets really cold – you know, down to minus 300º Celsius, something like that. And if you want to go in towards the Sun, it’s going up to plus 300º or 400º Celsius. It’s getting really hot. So you’ve got to think about, OK, can my electronics stand up to those kind of extreme temperatures? And I think in general the rule of thumb is in space in full direct sunlight if you’ve just got a satellite near the Earth it gets up to about 150º Celsius. If it gets shadowed, let’s say you go behind the Earth and you’ve got no sun, it drops down to minus 60º Celsius. So that’s a huge swing in temperatures. Another challenge is radiation. You’re up in space. You don’t have an ozone layer to protect you. So you’re getting all this UV radiation. You’re getting charged particles as well. You’re getting protons, electrons being coughed out by the Sun. And they’re hitting your electronics or your solar panel, whatever is on the satellite. You’ve got magnetic fields which can mess up with your electronics. And you’ve got cosmic radiation as well, which have been proven to really mess up your electronics. Then the next thing, you’ve got to consider, how do you tackle the whole area of reliability? [Drinks] It’s good stuff guys. And the way you do it is, OK, there are three rules of thumb. Contrary to what a lot of people think is, play it safe. Don’t do something risky.
A lot of people think, ‘Space technology, oh it’s completely wacky stuff. They’re going to take the latest technology and send it up into space.’ Incorrect. Generally, what the space industry does, it takes existing technology that has proven reliability and they test it even more. They don’t like taking risks. So they do every kind of a test imaginable. You think about what’s it going to be like taking off, what’s it going to be like up there? And you do those tests. You try to simulate the environment. And as well if you can’t simulate the environment, try and get some guy on a computer to simulate it. Do a computer analysis of it. And an example would be the Space Shuttle from NASA. It has been in use for 20 years and it’s going to be in use for another while, because they haven’t come up with anything better. So the kind of tests that they do, and I have been over here in the European Space Agency Test Centre in the Netherlands, and it’s really impressive what they’ve got over there. They try to simulate every kind of environment, from lift-off to space. So when they are doing lift-off, for example, they have – I have shown here. [Slide: ‘Reliability testing under extreme conditions’]. There is an acoustic simulator. This is basically like standing in front of a speaker in Oxegen. You’ve just got this massive speaker here. And it’s inside a soundproofed room. Close the doors. They put in their satellite and they turn up the volume, as loud as they can. And they simulate what it’s like when you’re doing take off. You know, it’s really loud. And other simulators – in NASA here, there is a solar simulator. [Slide: Solar Simulator, NASA] This is a massive vacuum chamber. They put a satellite into it. They’ve got huge lamps that simulate what the Sun would be like shining on a satellite. They turn it on, and they see how their electronics behave, whether the heat will actually degrade the electronics. They’ve got vibration simulators as well. This is a shaker, they call it. [Slide: Shaker] They stick the satellite on it, and just shake it as hard as they can - again to simulate take-off.
You do computer simulations as well. OK, this is probably something you would see on Playstation at the moment. It’s a flight simulator. [Slide: Reliability – Computer Simulation – shuttle flight simulator and solar cell thermal simulations] But they also do more basic simulations. Like here, I have got a solar cell. And what they’re simulating is the temperature. If the Sun is shining on the solar cells and one of them fails, what will that do to the rest of the solar panel? So you’ve really got to think of everything that could possibly go wrong. So the conclusion, what I’ve tried to show here, is that a lot of the technologies are very basic, but you’ve just got to test, test, test, all the way.
I am going to move on to what I have called, space myth number four. And it’s Ireland in space. And I found this on the Web a few days ago. And I suppose it’s the impression that people get when they think ‘Ireland and space, no way. These guys are going to mess it up. I mean you’re not going to leave an Irish guy to send something up into space.’ [Slide: Comic representation] But if you look at it on a world scale, yes, we are very small. And the thing is there are only two countries who are very big really, at the moment anyway. And that’s the USA and Russia. And I have a chart here of the number of launches per year that each of the countries have done. [Slide: Chart – Orbital Spacecraft Launches] And you can see that the United States and Russia of course are way ahead of everybody. But Europe has quite a number as well. They have had between five and 10 launches over the last 10 years. Japan and India as well, and of course, the sleeping giant, China, is coming up and overtaking everybody. So we’re small on a world scale. But there’s a lot going on. And it’s mainly driven by the European Space Agency. So probably a lot of people are familiar with NASA, the North American space association. But the European Space Agency has been on the go for, kind of, since the 1950s really. But it’s really come together as an organisation in the 1970s. And it involves most of the…at least the early European countries. And there are some associated countries as well, like Switzerland. And they really cover everything that could be covered in space. They do Earth observation. They do extraterrestrial observation. They do all kinds of things really in space - communications. So that should be your first port of call if you are interested in the whole space area.
So Ireland’s interaction with the space agency has been ongoing since about 1975. And we have actually been putting money into the space agency every year. The last number I could find was €12 million in 2005. That’s probably gone up a little recently. So we’re actually putting money into the agency every year. And the first question you should be asking is, ‘OK, what are we getting back?’ But we are getting money back. And there is a "geo-return" policy. You can just about see it down here. [Slide: European Space Agency]. What that means is, whatever we put in we should be entitled to get it back out as well. So we are putting €12 million in, we are entitled to go in and bid for projects. And if you’ve got a good idea you can go to the European Space Agency and hopefully they will give you a nice wad of cash to carry out your brainwave. You can see we are doing lots of different things, from basic science to launchers, to navigation - so all kinds of different things. And this should be an eye-opener to a lot of people. There’s actually an awful lot going on in Ireland – everything from propulsion, to lift-off, to high reliability components, microwave components (that’s transmission), opto-electronics, software and telecommunications. So this is taken from the Enterprise Ireland website. [Slide: Enterprise Ireland website] There really are quite a number of companies around Ireland developing technologies. And they are actually up there in space at the moment.
So I am going to try and focus on where I work and that’s what I know best. That’s the background that I have. And it’s with the Tyndall National Institute in Cork. We are a research institute, focusing on electronics and photonics – that’s things to do with light, devices that detect and send out light. And we are a mix of staff and students. So we are associated with a university. But our role with the European Space Agency goes back about 20 years, back to 1982 actually. And in 1988 we were designated a microelectronics test and support lab. So what that means is, ESA says, ‘OK, we have got a rocket, there’s something going wrong in it. Here’s a piece of equipment, can you test it?’ So we’ll take it in. We’ll do a little bit of testing and we’ll put together a report on it. That's the kind of things that we do. So there’s a nice picture here of a thermal shock chamber. [Slide: Thermal Shock Chamber]. We try to simulate, let’s say, the heat environment in space, going from hot to cold, if you go in front or behind of a planet. Mechanical shock – if something gets dropped. We try to simulate what’s that like. Again we have high temperature testing equipment, humidity equipment. What we would usually do, the types of things we do are long-term storage testing, reverse engineering – we take a device, basically tear it apart and see how it works. And if something goes wrong, we are trying to find out what goes wrong with it. And if we need more detailed analysis we use more advanced equipment. We can do X-ray imaging. So if we need to look inside a piece of equipment or a device we’ve got this X-ray machine that can look in there.
We can do thermal imaging, which basically means if we have got a piece of electronic equipment and it’s running too hot, but we don’t know where the heat is coming from, you can get this thermal camera that can look inside the device and tell you where the hot spots are. And if we need to do really advanced analysis we have various, what are called electron microscopes. So instead of using light you use electrons to look at very high resolution at materials. These are basically atoms you are looking at here. [Slide: Atoms through Electron Microscope] So you can look down to an atomic level and seeing are the atoms aligning up right, or are they failing. The types of technologies we have developed, the first major technology was a device known as a RADFET. So it’s a radiation field effect transistor. What this does is detect radiation at very low levels. And it’s very sensitive and uses very little power. And what this was used for by the European Space Agency – they would put it on their equipment, let’s say satellites going up into space, or a sensitive piece of equipment. And this will detect how much radiation is coming from the Sun basically, whether it be UV radiation or charged particles. And it will tell you how much radiation your piece of equipment has been exposed to. And then you can work out, OK, this piece of equipment is going to last for a year or two years or whatever. So as I say, it’s being used by ESA at the moment. It’s up there in space.
The second general area of equipment we’ve had out there are what are called millimetre wave devices. These were initially used for looking out into space and looking at objects that emit very high frequency signals. And these devices can detect the signals and give you an image of what’s out there, something you couldn’t see otherwise, just using the naked eye or optical telescopes. And more and more they are being used for communications. And even more recently, you can use these devices for looking at the atmosphere, let’s say around the Earth, for Earth imaging. And I’m going to show you a picture of that later on. This is a project I was directly involved in. [Slide: BepiColombo Mission] And it’s called the BepiColombo mission. The European Space Agency are going to send a satellite to planet Mercury, which is the closest planet to the Sun, in 2014. And they have various reasons for why they want to do it. It’s quite an interesting planet. It’s so close to the Sun. It gets affected by gravity so strongly. It’s got extreme temperatures. But the bottom line is, the temperature is going to be as high as 350º Celsius. The satellite is going to hit that kind of temperature. So you can imagine, you have your mobile phone and you pop it into what I have here, an oven. An oven only goes to about 275º, a kitchen oven. What’s going to happen? It’s going to melt. So we have got to develop electronics that are going to last up to 350º Celsius. What we’ve had to do is - just a bit of background – most electronics out there in your computer, in your mobile phone, your TV screens, they are based on silicon. It’s one of the most common materials out there. It’s basically sand that has been purified, it’s been heated up and purified. But silicon works great up to about 100º Celsius, maybe 150º, and then things start to go belly up. It doesn’t switch on when it’s supposed to switch on. It starts failing. So things go all over the place.
So the European Space Agency decided, ‘OK, we’ve got to consider alternatives here.’ Chances are silicon is going to fail. So they looked at these new materials, two in particular, gallium nitride and silicon carbide. Gallium nitride, you might not know it. But I presume everybody has some kind of an LED light, either on their bike or in a torch or whatever. Those LED lights are made from a material known as gallium nitride that was developed about 20 years ago. And in fact the first gallium nitride grown in Ireland was here in Trinity about ten years ago. When I started my PhD, that’s the group I joined. So it’s amazing how quickly it’s actually been taken up as a space technology. But what it’s got is a much higher melting temperature than silicon. It’s got a much higher, what is called a breakdown field. So you can turn up the voltage across this material and it won’t break down. You do this with silicon and it will start leaking current. And it’s got a band gap as well, an electronic band gap. And again that’s basically a number that tells you when your device switches on. So these materials are much more promising than silicon. But they are very new, so the space industry is a little bit wary about using them.
But we had some experience of developing devices in these materials down in Tyndall. So we have developed this kind of a device. It’s called a Solar Cell Protection Diode. [Slide: Solar Cell Protection Diode] And what it basically does is, if you’ve got a large solar panel, and let’s say a shadow comes across part of it, some of your solar cells get turned off basically and they can go into what is called reverse bias. So they can damage the rest of the panel. These are little protection devices to protect in case that happens. Let’s say if you go behind the Moon or something like that, or you get partially shadowed. We test our devices up to 300º, 350º up even to 400º Celsius. And we would test typically for 1,000 hours. Basically you pop these things in an oven for 1,000 hours. You check them every now and then. You come in in the morning and you check them. It’s like looking after a child sometimes. You just have to keep an eye on them, see where they go wrong. But they behave pretty good. At 400º Celsius we start to see things going wrong alright. So we are trying to find out why that is. As I show here, they have done very well. [Slide: ‘Not everything goes to plan’ – failure, investigation, still improving] But some of the devices, you are driving these things so hard. You’re heating them up to 350º Celsius and you’re driving high current through them, that the slightest mistake in your process or something is wrong in the device, you get catastrophic failure. The whole thing just burns in a shot. So that’s what happened to some of the devices. That’s where the science comes in. You go in and you look at your process and you try and find out where these things go wrong. And you investigate.
So that’s pretty much an overview of what we do at Tyndall and what Ireland is doing. What I’m going to try and do now is, maybe give you an overview of… you’ve seen what goes on out in space. And I am sure all of you are asking, and the taxpayer is asking, ‘OK, we are spending so much money on space technology, is it any good to us? Is it coming back down to earth?’ And I took a look at the NASA website and the ESA website and they have got hundreds and hundreds of what they call spin-off technologies, things we never knew came down from space – scratch-resistant lenses for example, and self-adjusting sunglasses. And that’s all well and good. But is it really worth all the money we’re investing in space technology? So I am going to try and highlight a number of areas where I think there’s been significant progress in space technology, and how it’s been taken back down to earth. The first one of these is in solar and fuel cells. And I am going to just focus on solar cells. Sorry, and I’m going to go through a few more areas as well – transport and medical and security and environmental monitoring. But the first one is solar energy.
And what this chart here shows you is, it shows the efficiency of solar cells. [Slide: ‘Space Technology for Energy - Solar Cells’] If you want to go out tomorrow and buy a solar cell there’s actually a lot of options out there, what you could buy. And the option comes from the fact that different solar cells have different, what are called, efficiencies. How much light you put in and how much electricity you get out. Most solar cells only convert… about 10% of the light that comes in gets converted to electricity. The rest gets wasted in heat. So they actually heat up, and they get less efficient. But the most efficient solar cells, these ones up here, they are about, I think, 43% is the record at the moment. They were developed for space. And they’re called multi-junction solar cells. And they are really a smart piece of technology. What they do is, if you look at the Sun’s spectrum, the Sun is made up of all different colours of light – red, green, blue. It’s got infrared, it’s got UV. So it’s got all the different components of light. If you could capture each one of those components, then you’d have a lot more efficient cell. That’s the problem with most cells. They only capture one part. They might capture the red part. What space solar cells do is, they’ve got different materials that capture different parts of the solar spectrum. And they’re much more efficient in that way.
But at the same time they’re very difficult to make. You can imagine trying to put all these materials together and make sure they all give out the right amount of current, and that you match everything up, is very difficult. So that’s a big challenge. But they are being used down on earth. And as I say they’re the most efficient solar cells you can get on earth at the moment. And in places like Spain and America, especially in big desert areas, they’re using these cells with huge, what are called, concentrators. They’ve got massive lenses or mirrors and they are focusing down the light. And they’re running these things at very high light concentration, a bit like a magnifying glass. And they’re very efficient. But they’re very hard to make. And we’re working on this area at the moment, down in Tyndall. And we’re looking at new materials, gallium nitride, like I said already. We have a reactor as it’s called here. [Slide: Gallium Nitride Reactor] It’s a machine that can grow this material. Because potentially gallium nitride could be the most efficient solar cell material of all, because it captures all of the solar spectrum in one material system. So I think that’s the way it’s going to go with solar cells.
The next area is space technology for electric cars. Probably in ten years' time most of us will be driving an electric car, or a hybrid electric car as they are called, a HEV. So you’ve got an electric engine and you’ve got a petrol driven engine, or a fossil fuel driven engine. But to operate your electric engine you need high temperature electronics. Your electronics actually run very high, because you’re running very high current in your car, you know, to drive the car. These electronics have actually already been developed for space. What’s happening at the moment is, they are taking the technology that’s been developed for space, and they are incorporating it into the transport industry. And even at the moment we’re involved in a European project down in Tyndall where they’re trying to make an all-electric car based on silicon carbide electronics.
The next area I’m going to look at is space technology for health. And this – you might remember that I showed you a device that Tyndall had developed for radiation monitoring in satellites. Well there’s a US company that has taken this technology and they’re using it for monitoring radiation dose in cancer treatments. So what this little… it’s a tiny little device that you can either put on a patch on your face. I actually have it in here if anybody wants to look at it afterwards. And it’ll monitor how much radiation you’re getting, if you have to go through radiation treatment for cancer. They can also implant it, this little thing here, you can implant it beside a tumour or actually in the tumour, if you want to measure how much radiation dose you’re getting. [Slide: Radiation Detection Implant] Because it’s critically important. If you get too much radiation you’re going to kill healthy cells around you. If you don’t get enough radiation you won’t kill the tumour that’s doing you harm. So this is, I think, the world’s first implantable wireless radiation detector for medical applications. There’s no wires attached. You just put it in there, you get a little detector. And it tells you how much radiation you’ve given. That just came on the market, I think, last year in the US.
Some of you are probably familiar with CERN in Switzerland on the French Swiss border. This is a large synchrotron. [Slide: CERN synchrotron] Basically you’ve got electrons flying around in a circle and they give off radiation of all different types. And it’s a huge scientific facility. It’s one of the most advanced in the world. And the RADFET, or the devices that were developed in Tyndall, are being used in CERN at the moment. And there’s a company in Cork called Smiths Detection. They’ve taken over Farran Technology which came out of Tyndall. And they develop systems for security monitoring in airports. They can basically see if you’re carrying a gun or a knife or whatever….a bottle of whiskey. And that, of course, is hugely important now, especially in the US. This technology is also being used for environmental monitoring. So they can basically look down from above with a satellite and tell you how much different pollutants you have in your atmosphere, whether you’ve nitrous oxide or CO2 or ammonia. And again if you go to the ESA website you can look at some amazing images. If you want to see how smoggy Dublin is, you can just click on there. And this was all developed from this, what’s called terahertz imaging. So it’s very high frequency. Your mobile phone works on gigahertz technology. This is 1,000 times faster – it’s terahertz.
OK, the last part, the career options, why you’re all here….maybe. Well what I’ve tried to do here is, briefly give you an overview of what are your options. If you’re interested in space and you’re interested in doing something that’s related to developing space technology, where do you go? And I suppose straight away you might think of, ‘OK, the only option is an astronaut. Or I am going to be some wacky astrophysicist that’s going to look at galaxies miles away.’ But there are a number of options. The first one is to join an international organisation like the European Space Agency, NASA, JAXA here is the Japanese Space Agency. There’s quite a number of national space agencies around the world. And they do everything, as I say, from looking at the Earth, looking into outer space. They put up satellites for TV. Whatever you’re interested in, they cover them.
The second option would be to go directly into the space industry. So these are the companies that actually do the work for the international organisations, sending up the satellites. [Slide: Space Technology Companies] These are huge aerospace companies that would send satellites up into space. And we would have worked with some of these.
The third option, nice option, is to work in an observatory, usually in very nice sunny locations, because they need as little cloud cover as possible. So you get places like Hawaii and the Canaries that have… or South America where they’re looking up into space from the Earth. And they’re looking at what’s out there. Or you could use data that’s coming down from satellites in space and be involved then as an environmental scientist. So looking at what’s happened to the polar ice cap, for example, or looking at smog levels or pollution levels. This is a real growth area I would say, if you’re interested. And, of course, you can be an academic as well. You can take someone’s job here in Trinity and become a lecturer or a professor. But there’s not only Trinity, a lot of the colleges around Ireland have departments of astrophysics or astronomy. If that interests you, that’s also a career option.
As I say, ESA is an organisation I’ve worked with. They’ve got a number of locations around Europe. And they’ve got one in South America. So they do different things. They do technology development, space operations – that’s where they control it, spacecraft – Earth observation, if you want to look down at the polar ice caps or whatever, astronaut training, it’s out there, astronomy. And the launch site, as I say, is in South America. That’s where the rockets actually go up. Life as a research scientist, that’s what I do. I don’t work on space projects the whole time. But you take the money from where it comes from. We’ve had some funding from the European Space Agency. But the type of things we do is, you know, we look at what are the scientific needs out there – who is giving the money, who is funding us. What are the economic and scientific needs? We come up with a plan. We try to design a solution. If we’re making devices we fabricate them. We’ve got advanced test facilities and fabrication facilities. We test them. And then you get the odd chance to go to nice places to present your work or for meetings… whatever. So it’s a good mix if you want to be a research scientist.
And it’s not only space technology work. At the moment I am working on solar cells. So things vary. But you do get the chance to do a lot of different things. So if you’re interested I would say start today. Go to the European Space Agency website. There’s a huge amount of information there. If you’re interested in the career side of things, there’s a career section where even as a student you can come in on board. If you want to do an internship you can go over to the Netherlands, Germany, wherever. You sit it in and annoy somebody for the day, watch how they do their work. If you want to do a postgraduate study there, you can do that. If you want to do postdoctoral study, research, whatever, there are a number of locations around. And you can see even there’s programmes for students to get involved.
There was a call there for Moon missions, for a project where students would actually design a satellite that would go up to the Moon. They really do want to engage with the public. If you are interested I would suggest go to the European Space Agency website and take a look. Alternatively, if you want to go for something a little different, you can also join this – do a 520-ay Mars simulation mission. If anybody wants to be locked into a room for, what is that, a year and a half, nearly two years, and feel what it’s like to survive in space and in Mars and I am sure you will be well paid for it, then that’s also an option. So that’s pretty much it folks. Thanks for your time. And if you’ve any questions, shout. [Applause] Yes.
Question from Audience: What kind of subjects would you suggest if students are interested in careers in this area – what subjects would you choose for going on to third level – what would be advisable?
Donagh O’Mahony: Believe it or not, science. Yes, of course, it’s science, maths…I mean geography - if you want to be an environmental scientist. If you want to look at things like polar ice caps and all that, you would take geography. Biology is important, because if you want to look at, let’s say, pollutants in the atmosphere, or if you’re interested in looking at different environments on different planets. But, of course, it is going to be science, in whatever form. Physics is a great grounding, because it gets your head around all the background you need – if you’re interested in lift-off devices or if you want to make little devices that go up into space, solar cells or whatever it may be. Chemistry is important, if you want to develop new materials for space. Let’s say you want to develop a new glue that’s going to stick your solar cell onto the panel that goes up onto the satellite. You’ve got to be good at chemistry. And you’ve got to know, OK, what material is going to stick well, but it’s also going to conduct heat away, and it’s also going to be radiation hard. So it generally is the science subjects. But it’s whatever takes your fancy you can take it on. And, of course, applied maths is also a great one as well. Yes, good looking man here in the audience…
Question from audience: No, I was just wondering, I was looking back at your picture of Captain Kirk and his miniature mobile phone. Do you have any idea of what the next big technology could be, that could come out of space, that we could be using in the next few years?
Donagh O’Mahony: Laser energy transmission. They are seriously considering transmitting energy from space using a laser or microwave technology. So you would have solar cells up on the Moon, solar panels, massive areas collecting sunlight non-stop and beaming it down to Earth. Now it’s a crazy idea. You’ve got to think about, OK, what’s going to happen when my energy hits the atmosphere? Is it going to dissipate? Is the light going to be reflected around the place? But alternatively they will store it up on the Moon. But there’s a big push and it’s quite aggressive. You know, people are thinking the Moon is the next place we’ve got to capture, we’ve got to take over. So there are some crazy ideas like that. But there is also more down-to-earth stuff, like let’s say the radiation monitor that’s developed in Tyndall. It’s likely that could have – you know, things like that, monitors and sensors could have much more applications down on Earth.
When you’re in space, then, when you’re an astronaut you have sensors all over to monitor your body, what’s happening to your body in space – photo-dynamic therapy, for example, looking at what’s happened to your bones. They use lasers to monitor your bone density. So things like that, it could be a monitor for osteoporosis, for example. There’s potentially lots. I would suggest take a look at the spin-off website on either NASA or ESA, and you’ll get a laugh out of it, if nothing else. [Applause]
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