Professor Michele Dougherty

You grew up in South Africa during apartheid. How aware were you of the regime at that time?

Not when I was a child. We would have a gardener who would come in, and we would have a maid who would come in and clean. Anyways, just normal. And then when I was a teenager, my dad was a member of what was then called the Progressive Federal Party, and he would go out canvassing. And while he was involved, the Progress it was called the PFP got their first Member of Parliament, Helen Sussman. And she was the only Progressive Federal Member of Parliament for many, many years. And that's when I began to think, mm, yeah, this is this is not quite right. And I then used to go out canvassing with my dad. But it was only really when I went to university That I began to make friends who were not white. And that's because I simply hadn't had the opportunity before. Totally separated.

2005, that was when the breakthrough happened, and it came out of the Cassini data. Take me through it. What did you find?

seven months after we got there. We flew past one of the little moons called Enceladus. Didn't expect to see much at all. I must confess that we didn't look at the data until about twenty-four hours later. But we saw something in our magnetic field data that was a bit strange. It was the first flyby we had done. We weren't sure if our data was calibrated properly. And so we held back, we didn't say anything, because we knew there was a second fly-by a month later. And on the second flyby, we saw a similar signature. And we also saw a large increase in water group ions. We saw lots of noise in the data. And only a magnetometer person can get excited about noise in the data. But you can use that noise to work out there was a big increase of water group ions. And I thought, okay, if it's really there, let's see if we can persuade the project to take us close on a third flyby which was planned in July of that year. So I remember I flew out to the jet propulsion lab. There was a science meeting that was going to take place. and I was going to try and persuade them. It was going to be difficult to do that because one of the things that we did in the six and a half years it took us to get to Saturn, we planned every second of every day's worth of observations. Everyone knew what the instrument was going to do, and here I was coming in saying, Oh, let's just change all of that. So the jet propulsion lab is based in California. So I flew from London to California, which is an eight hour time difference, and I arrived the day before the meeting. So I was standing in line at the Starbucks to get a coffee'cause I was jet lagged to hell, and the man in the line in front of me, whose name was Jerry Jones, was responsible for the Cassini spacecraft. And he turned to me and he said,'Michelle, what you doing here'? Wasn't expecting to see you, and I explained to him why I was there. And he rubbed his hands together in glee, and he said I've always wanted to go closer to a planetary body than anyone else. So I knew I had one vote in my back pocket. So I made the case. It wasn't consensus, but The project agreed that they would change the flyby. So instead of being 1,000 kilometres away, they were going to change it so it was 173 kilometres above the surface. For two or three nights before that flyby I didn't sleep, because if they hadn't found anything no one would ever have believed anything. I said again. Well, that's probably a slight and extreme statement, but I was a little bit concerned. And then what we found was instead of it being an atmosphere, There was a water vapor plume coming from or from the South Pole. Other instruments saw there were cracks at the South Pole. There was internal heat leaking out from the South Pole, and there was organic material in the plume. So, what does that tell us about Enceladus and what are the implications? I mean, that is a massive discovery, isn't it? It was a massive discovery. So, if you're looking for life or habitability in our solar system. Our understanding of how life forms is: you need liquid water, you need a heat source. And you need organic material. But you need those three things to be stable enough over a long enough period of time that something can happen. So we had three of those things. So I think that and some of the observations which the NASA Galileo spacecraft made at the moons of Jupiter. have changed Our thoughts about where you can find life in the solar system. There was a real focus on planets close to the sun, because if you're looking for liquid water, You need to be close to the sun so that water on the surface is thinking of it as rather than it could be inside. Absolutely. The most one of the most important realizations planetary scientists have come to in the last thirty years is you can go much further out in the solar system, find liquid water, but it's not on the surface, it's underneath the surface.

What are your thoughts on private space exploration companies?

Positive in the main. Because It allows more launches to take place. It enables the launches, the cost of launches to be cheaper. So it helps push the boundaries of what we launch and how we can launch. But a concern that I have is there are so many spacecraft up there now. That we might get to a position where seeing the night sky in all its glory is going to be difficult. It's getting really crowded up there. There are old spacecraft which are no longer operating but are up there and one has to be really careful that the spacecraft you launch don't crash into these other spacecraft. So I think we need to take a deep breath and think really carefully about how much is being put up into space. Needs to be joined up thinking, and I don't think we've quite got there yet.