Michael West’s Blog

Apologies for not posting for ages - its been a busy time. One piece of news worth sharing is that my first paper in a peer-reviewed international journal was published a few weeks ago. It is entitled ‘Testing a Helicon Double Layer Thruster Immersed in a Space-Simulation Chamber’ and appears in Vol. 24, No. 1 of the Journal of Propulsion and Power on pages 134-141. If you are interested, you can find download the first page of it for free from here or if you’d like a copy of the whole paper just drop be an email.

Yes, I am still alive! Unfortunately I haven’t spent the last 2 months on holidays in Cairns either, as James suggested here. Life has been very very busy. Since the IPELS2007 conference in Cairns some of the following has transpired…

• I’ve had a new housemate living with us for two months (his name is Denis and he is visiting from Germany)
• Spent a week in Sydney at the Australian Space Science Conference
• The soccer season has come to a close - we didn’t make the finals
• I scored the winning goal in the ANU Research Schools Final, the Purple Shin - more on that later
• Been flat out in the lab doing lots of different things
• My first journal paper got accepted for publication - yippee!!
• Went to JT & Annie’s wedding in Sydney
• Indulged my passion for gardening and started a vegetable garden at home, only to see it wither in the heat
• And numerous other things…

More details will be coming soon, but the two big things that are coming up are pretty exciting Christina will be arriving in Canberra permanently this Tuesday and I will be heading to the US for two weeks in November to attend a planetary exploration conference at NASA Ames. The other not so exciting thing in the horizon is my PhD Mid Term Review on 22nd November - eeekk!

I’m currently sitting in the Qantas Club in Sydney watching the sunrise over the city - a really amazing site. I’m here because I got upgraded to business class for my flight to Cairns and subsequently get free use of the Qantas Club. I’m off to Cairns for the week to attend the 9th International Workshop on the Interrelationship of Plasma Experiments and Space (IPELS2007), which is a conference on space physics that my research group SP3 is running. I’m really looking forward to conference and making the most of the warm weather. It was 28 degrees there yesterday and the minimum was higher than Canberra’s maximum yesterday!

It will also be nice to have the conference completed as I have been on the organising committee and been responsible for the conference website and online abstract submission system etc - quite a time consuming task. I will be presenting a poster at the conference so fortunately I don’t have the stress of doing an oral presentation. My abstract on my work on the Helicon Double Layer Thruster can be found here. The conference includes a day out at Green Island so I will do my best to post some photos.

As I reported here back in March, a film crew from ABC’s Catalyst program visited my lab to do a story on the Helicon Double Layer Thruster. The story will be going to air tomorrow (Thursday) evening at 8pm on ABC TV. It will include interviews with my two supervisors, Professor Rod Boswell and Dr Christine Charles, and show footage of the HDLT prototype operating inside its new space simulation vacuum chamber. I doubt I will actually feature in the segment, but when the HDLT is running and you see the purple glow of the plasma, I am the one working the controls

(more…)

The past 4 weeks have been pretty hectic and the last week has been just plain awful (more on that later). It probably best to start at the beginning. So far this month has consisted of …

• Christina and I had an engagement party in Sydney (which was great) and then another one in Canberra the next afternoon (which was also great). Photos are coming soon.
• The upgrades on the vacuum chamber for the HDLT were finally finished allowing me to reassemble everything (about 2 weeks of work) and attempt to get experiments underway. More on that in my next post.
• I had a French engineering student shadow me at work for a week. It was good to have the extra set of hands to help with things, but keeping him busy was draining.
• I’ve been off to the physio on average twice a week for treatment on my hand, which is improving so at last I can return to goalkeeping duties. My two games playing in defense were admirable but contained moments of madness including conceding a direct free kick for a tackle in the box. Fortunately our substitute keeper saved it (and my dignity).
• Canberra was forecast to get snow down to 500 metres (basically everywhere) and it didn’t. Such an anti-climax. All we got instead were a few nights at -6 deg C and a nice white blanket on the ranges.
• I traveled to Brisbane for Christina and my final engagement party. After some running around to organise things the day before it all went smoothly and was also good. I even made raspberry & white chocolate muffins from scratch (under Christina’s guidance)!! Photos coming soon as well.
• I’ve been staying up to watch the Socceroos woeful performance thus far in the Asian Cup. Thankfully they rediscovered playing professionally and beat Thailand to progress to a quarter-final showdown against Japan.
• Finally, I got the reviewer’s comments back on my first journal paper. Their comments were positive but much work is required to get all the changes they requested done.

The photo above is a of brushtail possum that was perched in one of the trees outside the Research School of Physical Sciences & Engineering where I work. The poor thing looked pretty cold and was happy to sleep there most of the day. Even the noise from the workshops didn’t trouble it.

Last Friday a film crew and reporter from ABC’s science show, Catalyst, visited our lab to do a story on the Helicon Double Layer Thruster. They interviewed my supervisors, Prof Rod Boswell and Dr Christine Charles, and filmed my experiment in operation. I disconnected the thruster so they could also take some shots of it on a bench while the reporter, Graeme Phillips, explained the components and how it worked. It is unlikely I will feature in the story and if I do it will just be footage of me carrying and installing the thruster in the vacuum chamber. I took a few photos of the film crew doing there stuff, which are below. When we know when the story will air on the ABC I will let people know.