 Hi, I'm Victoria Hodges and I work at Astrium Ltd in Stiefnidge. And what is it that you do? I am an Astrium Orbit Control Systems Engineer for the Gaia spacecraft project. And what is the Gaia space project? Gaia is a European Space Agency mission designed to map the galaxy essentially. It's going to measure the positions and radial velocities of all the stars in the galaxy, which is about a billion stars. And it's hopefully going to be launched in 2012. Okay, and what's your sort of precise involvement in the team or project? Precisely. I look after one of the so-called operational modes of the spacecraft. So there's these five states of the spacecraft can be in during its six and a half year lifetime. And one of those is a mode that I look after called inertial guidance mode. And basically this is like a transition mode. So we enter this mode first of all at the very early part of the mission. So once you've gone off the top of a rocket off the top of the launcher, you're in a preliminary orbit. And the what's called the sun shield on our spacecraft because it basically looks like a top hat has been deployed because it's folded up when it's inside the rocket. And first of all it goes into a kind of a safe mode and deploys that sun shield. And then after a time it will enter inertial guidance mode where the role there is basically to stabilise everything and start to set it up ready for an orbital manoeuvre at that point from where it's been put into orbit. Kind of a low earth, medium earth orbit and push it out to the L2 point in between the sun and the earth where it can actually carry out the scientific observations. Sounds exciting if a little complicated. What got you into science in the first place? Actually it's quite strange because I always love science and especially kind of astronomy. But I didn't really envisage doing anything with it when I was sort of 14 or 15. It was more the fact that I had a very inspirational physics teacher when I was in my GCSE years and she turned around to me one day when I'd kind of been on work experience at a law firm and decided that was really dull and didn't want to do it anymore and said don't worry physics is really exciting and you're really good at it and look at all these things you could possibly do. And actually the pamphlet she showed me turned out to be from the university that I then went to later on and all it said on the front was rocket scientists wanted. I thought that sounds cool. So is that a message that you like to spread? Yeah, I think so. I mean my motivation for being involved in the outreach side of things is really just a spark and interest because I can remember what my year nine science classes were like at school and I can remember them being rather dull. I thought the extent of physics was plugging in a few light bulbs and wiring up circuit boards which I didn't like and wasn't particularly good at that side of things and a very disinterested teacher who didn't seem to like to be there as much as the students didn't like to be there. So I know that was probably more negative than some other people's experience but I really like to think well I want to try and inspire them to see what world of opportunities that physics could actually offer and that it's not just about plugging in light bulbs at school and okay you have to do those things now to get the fundamentals right but once you've got that the whole world is open to you and physics can basically explain anything and everything around you you can look around you every day and think ah, physics can explain that and it's just fantastic to be able to do that. And what is the outreach work that you do? What have you been doing? Right, well I started out basically doing I became a STEM ambassador, science, technology, engineering and maths ambassador as they're now called, when I joined Astrium about three years ago and started off doing the events that were put on by the company and put on by our local set point organisation so visiting schools doing a few workshops and then gradually I got more and more into it and I was actually part of a graduate scheme at Astrium and managed to basically persuade the PR and communications group that they really wanted to take me on for a couple of months and I had nothing else to be doing and let me do outreach stuff and be paid for it full time and it was a fantastic two or three months and I was basically given the task of designing and implementing a new visit programme to be held on-site because we'd started having a few on-site visit requests from schools and we weren't really geared up to actually delivering that kind of visit because essentially we didn't really have anything prepared and we would come in and get the same kind of talk that we would give to business people or older groups who might want to be interested in coming to visit Astrium and they went away very bored and we got some quite negative feedback from some local schools who came and did those sorts of visits saying perhaps you could do this, perhaps you could do something more. But that's changed now? Yes, it's all changed. 18 months ago I basically started putting this programme in place and it's a half-day programme with four basic activities and the whole thing is designed to bring home the message that space matters to you as a child sitting there, what it can do for you in your daily life so we have an activity based around identifying space-based technology in your daily life that you might not have thought of and also about showing them that satellite engineering may sound complicated but hey, F equal to MA is the most useful thing you'll ever learn and a lot of the stuff you're learning at school right now can explain a lot of the concepts that we're using so we have a hands-on workshop which is curriculum based and it's based on the QC3 for an ASA2, there's three separate ones and essentially they go round and there's some hardware laid out we've got real hardware which we've basically pilfered from the clean rooms that's not needed anymore or if it was they don't know about it and ask them questions about it, get them to pick it up and touch it and I think that's the really amazing part is they get to pick up and feel some of the things that are real space hardware and the great one is saying how much do you think that costs oh, I don't know, like a couple of hundred pounds and say no, that's £20,000 worth of equipment sitting there and you're touching it and they're like wow so it's really improved the whole visit programme and the feedback that we've had has been overwhelmingly positive OK, lastly, thanks for this time what do you think you're going to spend £1,000 on? Crikey, I guess I could say paying off student debts which I still have otherwise, I don't know maybe I'll let it sit in my bank account and then treat me to something, a well-earned, a treat sometime in the summer holidays although I won't be taking a holiday till after hour big project review in September so we shall see