Space scientist and ‘The Sky At Night’ broadcaster Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock MBE talks telescopes and toilet rolls, cross-fertilisation and the cosmos, and never dropping The Clangers…
Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock MBE
Boldly going.
Photos: James Cheadle @ The Royal Institution
PEOPLE
Discussing the fascinating unknowns of human intelligence at the Royal Palace of Stockholm – where the first World Dyslexia Assembly saw Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock share the power of her own dyslexic thinking – has reminded the eminent space scientist of what exploration means to her.
“It takes on many different facets for me,” she says. “There’s obviously space exploration, but also exploring our planet and our minds. With exploring there’s so much cross-fertilisation - when we went down to the deep oceans, we found life where we didn’t think life was possible. From that, we are now looking out into deep, dark space and thinking about whether life can occur on the moons of Saturn.”
Captivated by space and scientific discovery since she was a little girl in the Seventies, stationed in front of the television and glued to intergalactic cult classics, Maggie always craved to set foot on cosmic soil. “The Clangers were very formative for me; I just loved these little creatures with their little ears. They caught my heart and my attention, so one of my childhood dreams was to go and meet them.” Tears of pride and joy would stream, decades later, when Maggie finally managed to do so, appearing in their 50th anniversary special The Visitor, in miniature model form.
From mousey moon-dwelling critters, Maggie made the leap to loyal Trekkie – “it turns out that The Clangers is the gateway drug that leads on to hardcore science fiction” – and before long was taking her first steps into space instrumentation. And while for most of us, as children, the extent of building a telescope would simply call for the cardboard tube of an unravelled toilet roll, Maggie had the real deal in mind.
Exploration
It takes on many different facets for me. There’s obviously space exploration, but also exploring our planet and our minds. With exploring there’s so much cross-fertilisation...
The ghosts of STEM past, and a face of its future: Maggie imparted her wisdom to guests of Hoare Lea at the Royal Institution recently, following in the footsteps of those who’ve shaped the esteemed science hub over its 200-year history – the likes of Michael Faraday (electric motor inventor), Alexander Graham Bell (telephone inventor), Ada Lovelace (mathematician) and Joan Evans (the first woman to give a Friday Evening Discourse)
Clear, early focus
“I’d bought a telescope but it had plastic lenses and wasn’t very good. I saw an evening class in telescope making in a magazine (you could make a telescope?!) so I went along, expecting I’d need to take my loo roll – me, about 13 or 14 at the time, and everybody else there white and male with an average age of about 50.
“What you can do is take two slabs of glass, put an abrasive powder in between them, then grind away. I used to watch Star Trek while making my telescope mirror; it took me about six months. One surface becomes convex and one becomes concave, so you take the spherical concave surface and make it into a parabola – the perfect shape for taking light from a long distance away and bringing it into a nice, sharp focus. I made the mirror, got it coated, built a box to go around it and then I had my telescope.”
Most people make a fairly simple Newtonian telescope with their parabolic mirror plus the sort of simple flat mirror you can buy anywhere. Not Maggie. “I wanted to jazz things up so I made a Cassegrain system which involves making the mirror, punching a hole in it, then making a hyperbolic mirror, which I had no idea how to do. It probably didn’t give the best imagery, but it was good fun!”
Passions proved and life-path coordinates positively plotted out, Maggie would go on to study physics and mechanical engineering, subsequently innovating more sophisticated scientific instruments, including hand-held landmine detectors and optical sub-systems for spacecraft. But it was far from a straightforward take-off – school was hard.
A struggle on life’s launchpad
“Science saved me,” she claims, explaining how moving schools 13 times didn’t make things any easier. “With my dyslexia I was put in the remedial class so I was effectively written off. But I remember sitting in a science class one day and my teacher asking the question: if one litre of water weighs one kilogram, what does one cubic centimetre of water weigh? As dyslexics, we’re really logical, so I thought; I’ve got this! I looked around the classroom and nobody else had their hand up so I put my hand down – I never put my hand up… The teacher was surprised. I put my hand up again and answered: one gram, miss? And she said: that’s right, Maggie! At that moment, I thought; if I can do that, what else can I do? It just opened the floodgates.”
On dyslexia
Science saved me... At that moment, I thought; if I can do that, what else can I do? It just opened the floodgates.
At another school, a serendipitous split-second choice – answering ‘top’ when asked which learning group she belonged in – saw her work twice as hard to keep up but also led to a lifetime of successful opportunism.
As an adult in the Nineties, she jumped at the chance to join the team working on the ground-based Gemini – the “wonderful eight-metre telescope that sits in the foothills of the Andes” – and spent a good six months out there, making some of the happiest memories of her career.
More latterly she was part of the team working on the James Webb infrared telescope, launched on Christmas day last year. “I was there, biting my nails. But now it’s gone up in space and I’m hopeful that it’ll give us more detail, and new understandings, of what’s out there. It has travelled 1.5 million km to the Lagrangian Point 2, which is like a gravitational null where it can sit without using propulsion, and it goes round the Sun with the Earth – although it’s looking away from the Earth. If it points towards the Sun or the Earth, the sensors will be blinded because it’s infrared, so it’s looking back in time to some of the earliest stars and galaxies in the universe.
“Each telescope does a different thing – UV, infrared, visible light – and it’s not until we merge them all together that we get a complete picture of the universe.”
It’s this appreciation of the holistic and the merits of mixing specialist and generalist thinking that has helped Maggie secure work on projects in private industry, academia and government. It has also seen her become an ambassador for the value of racial, gender and neural diversity and the vital wider insights that different backgrounds and perspectives can bring about.
As we get more AI, and the world of work changes, it is that creativity and logic – for example, the way that dyslexics think – that we will need, that will be the job requirements of the future. So, in every team you need diversity.
Diverse thinking: vital for our future
“We need neurodiversity, and diversity of every sort,” she says. “When you have lots of like-minded people doing stuff, you limit how far you can push forward. When you’ve got a diverse team and thinking is pinging off in different directions, you get a much broader solution to the challenges we face.
“As we get more AI, and the world of work changes, it is that creativity and logic – for example, the way that dyslexics think – that we will need, that will be the job requirements of the future. So, in every team you need diversity.
“It’s so important for the exciting reignition of the UK space industry too; I think that’s been one of the biggest changes in science and engineering recently. Before, many of us were in our own silos; physics over there, maybe a bit of biochemistry… Research councils and many companies have realised that when you start putting these different disciplines together, that’s when you get the real benefits; comparing and contrasting, learning from each other’s mistakes. I think that’s so important.”
An enthusiastic STEM educator, who has not only shared her experiences of dyslexia but also being part of the science world as a Black woman, Maggie is passionate about dismantling social mobility barriers and has imparted wisdom and encouragement to scores of inner-city schoolchildren. Having found dyslexia a hindrance that held her back when she herself was at school, she now counts it as her ‘superpower’, crucial in her science communication work where it enhances her storytelling and ability to take people on an emotional journey.
I decided I needed to go out and sell space science. I wanted to show that as a space scientist I get to travel the world, to take on the big challenges like climate change and make a real difference in society.
Selling space
“I set up Science Innovation [public engagement company] around 14 years ago to help recruit people into the space industry, which is pretty cool, so you’d have thought people would be queuing up to join us, but at the start we weren’t getting many applications coming through. I decided I needed to go out and sell space science. I wanted to show that as a space scientist I get to travel the world, to take on the big challenges like climate change and make a real difference in society.”
Embarking on her educational mission, Maggie made a start on school visits – 20 kids here, 30 kids there – and soon it ramped up. Since 2008, she’s inspired 350,000 of them.
She hopes one upshot will be to get more girls into STEM. “This last International Women’s Day, the hashtag was #BreakTheBias, and if you look at the data, it’s all pretty grim. Only 22% of the core STEM workforce are women. Back in 2019 there was a moment of celebration – for the first time, more girls had taken biology, physics and chemistry than boys. Yes! But when you looked closely at the numbers, they were still very biased in ways.
“When I first started going out to schools, I thought I needed to go to girls’ schools but it turns out that girls in girls’ schools are more likely to take physics and engineering. It’s a broader problem; it’s about spreading the word throughout society.”
People have very odd images of what the built environment is about; the hard hat and such. They don’t see all the other stuff that goes on behind it; the complexity and the glorious things that are made. It’s about changing perceptions.
Maggie also likes to talk role models and relevance – using examples of the wide range of jobs she’s done with a degree in physics and a PhD in mechanical engineering. “The more of us who talk about it – get out there, to schools, festivals, and tell people what we do – the better! People have very odd images of what the built environment is about; the hard hat and such. They don’t see all the other stuff that goes on behind it; the complexity and the glorious things that are made. It’s about changing perceptions.”
The roles she’s had certainly are myriad – in science, in space, as motivator, media maker – and exploring is clearly something she’s embraced throughout her career, with a proclivity for diversifying, staying agile and looking to the future. As well as presenting the BBC’s The Sky At Night and taking part in plenty more projects besides, over the years, Maggie’s now on the council of the Science and Technology Facilities Board. “I’ve been to many cleanrooms across the world but my goodness, theirs are amazing. They’re vast! They’ll do amazing stuff; the space industry is just booming across the world and in the UK it’s really taking off. It’s a very exciting time for the space industry here and having facilities like those is really going to help.
“In the next six to 10 months, we’ll have our own launch capability, the only one in Europe, able to launch small satellites on UK soil. In the past we talked about satellites being the size of double decker buses but now there’s a whole industry of small, quick-turnover satellites which go up, measure a few things and come back to Earth. With that launch capability, many people across the country and Europe will be able to be part of satellite launches – I’m certainly trying to sign up for that!”