Space - the EU frontier?

SPACE:In the face of straitened times on Planet Earth, ESA director Prof David Southwood argues the case for continuing to fund space missions

INTERCEPTING ASTEROIDS, charting the evolution of stars, circling Mars to map organic molecules and even landing on the red planet to collect and analyse materials. These are all on the European Space Agency (ESA)’s to-do list over coming years.

At a time when the economy on planet Earth isn’t quite as flush as it used to be, is now really the time to be spending on space ventures that push back the frontiers?

Professor David Southwood argues the case in favour. Director of science and robotic exploration at ESA, he was in Ireland recently to give a public talk on Europe and space.

And, while he finds a receptive audience in Ireland, he believes that, in general, we need to expand our horizons and confidence.

“It is a small island with really quite an intellectual tradition and yet you feel it could punch its weight better, not on the technology front so much as in the inspirational aspects of technology, believing you can be out on the frontier,” he says.

Ireland lacks a national space programme but is an active member of ESA, which we joined when the agency was founded in 1975. We currently pay around €14 million per year to participate in the core scientific programme as well as several optional programmes including launchers, telecoms, Earth observation and technology development.

The idea is that Ireland should be awarded contracts back in proportion to the value of our annual membership – that is, the annual contribution less overheads and other costs.

Irish scientists already do work for the ESA; also for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Last month, the US space agency was granted a patent on research by a University of Ulster computer scientist.

Roy Sterritt, who lectures in Informatics in the School of Computing and Mathematics at UU Jordanstown, worked with a NASA scientist to devise programs that could make small robotic craft self-directing and self-controlling, and also self-destructing if their autonomous behaviour were to threaten the safety or technical aims of the mission.

In the last decade over 50 Irish companies have secured ESA contracts worth over €60 million, but the direct value of the contracts does not yet match our financial contribution to the agency.

Strategic initiatives are being developed to help, and a spokesperson for Enterprise Ireland says “we are seeing significant growth in the size and range of Irish companies involved in the European Space Programme”.

Southwood also points out that it can take time. “It doesn’t come back minute by minute: it comes back decade by decade,” he explains. “And in a way, particularly with a small country like Ireland, sometimes you have to save up and make a large investment.”

Besides, he says, signing up to ESA just to get the industrial payback is a case of missing the (much) bigger picture.

“To do what we do you have to be right at the frontier of technical capability, but there is something else there. Open your eyes and look at what we are doing,” he says.

“We are exploring Mars, the next planet. When I was a small boy I didn’t even dream that I would be involved in putting things down on the surface of Mars. And we are looking at the beginning of time. [Back then], one did not imagine one would look back to the beginning of time because we didn’t even know that time began.”

In order to realise these missions, which were so unimaginable a few decades ago, ESA’s total annual budget is around €3.6 billion. Or, to put it into context: about one-tenth of an Anglo Irish Bank bailout.

Southwood’s budget within that is around €550 million, or just over one euro per year per person in the member states, he computes. “If I take what I contribute to society, Ireland included, I don’t have any shame,” he says.

“What do you get for your euro? You can buy half a cup of tea. It is a small amount. On the other hand, what does my programme give back? That money is largely spent employing people, pushing back the frontiers of technology.

“To see further than anyone else, to see behind things, you have to do things which haven’t been done before. This inevitably pushes technology, which you can then spin out.”

The EU has been using space technology for practical, Earth-bound applications, such as navigation and monitoring land use. But according to Southwood there’s an increasing move towards looking at where Europe needs to be on space exploration.

One of ESA’s upcoming missions aims to intercept an asteroid and gather sample material, explains Southwood. The agency’s Rosetta satellite has already captured close-up images of the asteroid Lutetia on a fly-by this summer, and the plan is to robotically land on an asteroid in coming years and return a chunk of it to Earth.

Asteroids are in vogue now as a testing ground for longer missions, and it’s not just Europe on the case: the Japanese explorer Hayabusa recently gathered an asteroid sample.

This kind of work may be a stepping stone to hunting for a more distant quarry – Mars. Ultimately the goal is to “scratch and sniff” the red planet, according to Prof Southwood, who notes that ESA and Nasa will be working together on upcoming missions.

One of the objectives is to scout out methane and other organic compounds on Mars. The ExoMars (Exobiology on Mars) mission, slated for 2016, will orbit the planet to generate a ‘methane map’.

“The Europeans are also going to use that mission to prove they can land on Mars, so we will send a little lander that will do a controlled descent with rockets, a soft landing,” says Southwood. The craft will then act as a relay satellite for future missions.

“It will be sitting there like the central telephone exchange, everything that is down on the surface [of Mars] will communicate through it back to Earth.”

Other projects include a plan to send two rovers to Mars in 2018 – one American and one European. The European rover will hunt down signs of life such as organic molecules, and will have the potential to drill into the planet’s core and analyse what is pulled up.

The 2020s will likely see missions aiming to return a rocket from the surface of Mars, according to Southwood.

While Europe and the US are working together on more space projects these days, there remain some areas where Europe has stronger capabilities, such as in tracking stars.

Next year sees the launch of Gaia, which will chart thousands of stars in the Milky Way.

“The telescope and the detection system are uniquely European. We have capabilities that allow us to follow 20,000 stars at a time as they track across our telescope,” says Southwood.

“And looking at the position of stars is going to allow us to deconstruct our galaxy. [The stars] are all at different stages of their development so you will get information about how stars evolve.”

The project will also help to shed light on the puzzle of dark matter, he adds.

“The stars are points of light and [it looks like] that’s all there is out there. But there has to be something else: you see that from the way the stars move,” he says, drawing the analogy of seeing a car on a road at night.

“You see two red lights and you say ‘there are two red lights moving along the road’. But no, there is really a car moving along the road.

“So there’s this dark matter about which we don’t know, and [through Gaia] we will at least find out where that is, how big the car is and how the car is behaving.”

So does Southwood see Ireland playing a greater a role in answering questions about the universe in coming years?

“One hopes so. I don’t think there’s any lack of will in the Irish population, at least I have never detected it. There’s no lack of will in the scientific community and you certainly have a good technical industry,” he says.

“It’s all in front of you: it’s whether you want to pick it up and run with it.”

There are no service stations on the surface of Mars

When developing robotic technologies for use in space, the thing to remember is that they need to work, according to Prof David Southwood, director of science and robotic exploration the European Space Agency.

“The smaller you can make it the better because it costs an awful lot of money to get something off the planet – overcoming gravity costs. But we have also got to have very high reliability because there are no service stations on the surface of Mars,” he says.

“You have got to make it autonomous and build in a lot of spare tyres because you don’t know what hazards you are going to face. And, although one wants to implement things like nanotechnology, at the same time there is this conservatism which says yes but it has got to work.”

Earlier this year the ESA satellite GOCE, which collects information about gravity as it orbits Earth, ran into a problem and stopped transmitting data back to ground. ESA eventually fixed the glitch through some careful manipulation.

“Life is like that. It is the equivalent of kicking the television but you cant do it by actually putting the boot against the set: you have to do it by turning it around and switching it off and on again,” says Southwood.

“One of the secrets about space is that you test and test before you go because there is a limited capacity to go up there and fix it.”