On September 7th and 8th, the EIRSAT-1 team attended the Irish National Astronomy Meeting 2017 in Maynooth University. This annual meeting brings together the Irish astrophysics community and features talks and posters from students, researchers and industry.
At the meeting we heard from Enterprise Ireland’s Bryan Rodgers about Ireland’s role in ESA missions. Exciting upcoming missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope and Athena were also discussed.
Program Manager and Endorsing Professor Lorraine Hanlon gave a presentation on Gamma-ray Astronomy, including discussing the development of gamma-ray detectors in the UCD Space Science group. She gave an overview of gamma-ray astronomy and the link to Gravitational Waves, the new frontier of astrophysics.
System Engineer David Murphy gave a presentation on EIRSAT-1, giving a brief overview of the mission’s payloads and subsystems. This talk was very well received and the support in the Irish Astrophysics community is amazing.
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Trinity College Dublin undergraduate Serena O’Connor presented a poster at the meeting, detailing her summer internship work on the power supply for GMOD, one of our payloads.
In addition, EIRSAT-1 team member Maeve Doyle presented her MSc work on Gamma-Ray Bursts and Pulsars. Shane Moran, another EIRSAT-1 team member, presented a summary of his MSc thesis on Machine Learning as a tool for detecting transients such as supernovae.
Shane received the Peter Curran Award for Best Student Talk at the end of the meeting.
Overall it was a very successful and enjoyable meeting. Like EIRSAT-1, INAM puts particular emphasis on recognising and encouraging students in astrophysics in Ireland. We look forward to giving an update on our mission at INAM 2018!