BBC Click feature Imperial

BBC Click came to Imperial to talk about the PAMSAT and GravLab campaigns from the Adaptive Emergent Systems Engineering (AESE) Lab with Michael Johnson. This episode also features the new KPMG Data Observatory in Imperial's Data Science Institute.

The programme opens by stating the overwhelming financial problem that has always plagued space missions: making equipment for space exploration, and getting it into space, is incredibly expensive. Valuable equipment does not tend to get reused because we either lose contact with it, or it burns up upon re-entry. Michael Johnson is looking to change that by developing lots of tiny spacecraft that can be accelerated to incredibly high speeds without requiring the huge amount of fuel traditionally required to escape Earth's atmosphere and gravitational pull.

Michael Johnson is a part-time PhD student at Imperial in the AESE Lab. His work focuses on integrated self-optimising cyber physical systems for space exploration. The AESE Lab is led by Prof Julie McCann.

Click is a weekly news programme and podcast that feature interesting developments and innovations in the world of tech.  You can see the programme on BBC iPlayer here.