Space Rocket Challenges for 2020

Winner of Secondary School Category: Megan

“This is a wonderfully drawn overview of a lunar mission, including lots of detailed drawings of individual parts of a rocket (including the rocket engines) and the mission profile. Great attention to detail and highly accurate!”

Winner of Primary School Category: Saskia

“I love the idea of this mission. There are lots of mission concepts for similar "swarms" of tiny satellites to go to lots of places at once. The spacecraft are beautifully drawn.”

Runner Up in Secondary School Category: Freya

 “This is a very cool design of a spaceplane, with clever use of bio-mimicry. I particularly like that it has been designed to limit it's harm to the environment, and that the colours have been inspired by the UKSA logo.”

Runner Up in Primary School Category: Tom

“This rocket makes good use of boosters, and I like the idea of a Saturn Gateway, a bit like the Lunar Gateway that NASA is developing! The moon probes are thoughtfully designed, especially the jet legs which are important for landing on moons with no atmosphere, and a range of sensor payloads for searching for life.”

Darcy:

Alexander:

Jessica:

Sofia:

Caitlin:

Oscar:

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Jonah:

• NPL contributes to the UK space industry enabling the age of privately financed space missions.
• NPL developed the science behind TRUTHS – a climate mission, led by the UK Space Agency, which will be delivered by the European Space Agency to enable in-flight calibration of Earth observation satellites and help deliver improved confidence in Earth Observation data gathered from space and the forecasts driven by this data
• NPL have been pioneers in atomic clock technology since its advent in 1955.Today, signals from 31 atomic clocks onboard satellites enable GPS
• NPL is helping space scientists understand the end-to-end performance of satellite instruments under operational conditions prior to launch through the development of novel instrumentation testing methods

Keep up to date with upcoming Outreach activities

• The UK Space Agency is one of the founding members of the European Space Agency (ESA). Over the next 4 years we will be investing £374 million per year to ESA giving us access to €6 billion of science, research and innovation output each year
• The UK Space Agency’s Spaceflight Programme aims to enable commercial spaceflight from UK spaceports. There are currently 7 proposed launch sites in the UK
• Space is part of our everyday lives. Satellites support services the UK public, businesses and government rely on every day – from checking the weather forecast on the go to monitoring farming yields; and from maritime navigation to mobile health screening
• There are over 41,000 people currently working in the UK Space Industry, and there not all astronauts, space sector jobs include aerospace engineers, physicists and entrepreneurs to name a few.
• The UK Space Agency celebrated its 10^th Birthday this year!