Michele Dougherty, a planetary scientist, has been appointed as the new Astronomer Royal by His Majesty. She became the UK’s first female to hold this title in the last 350 years of history.
The Astronomer Royal has outstanding contributions in space physics, astronomy and has played a major role in space missions.
She has been affiliated with various institutions across the UK and served as:
• Professor of Space Physics at Imperial College London
• Executive Chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
• Principal Investigator for the magnetometer instrument for the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Jupiter Icy moons Explorer (JUICE) mission
• President of the Institute of Physics
Michele Dougherty, in an interview with the BBC, said her designation would inspire more women and help “open people’s eyes” to space wonder.
“I want to engage with the public, excite them about what we do in astronomy, but also make it clear how important what we do is to the UK economy,” she added.
The female astronomer is a prominent space scientist and a member of the team leading probes to the icy moons of Jupiter. “It would be surprising if there wasn’t life in our solar system.”
Her interest in astronomy developed at the age of 10 when she saw Jupiter for the very first time with a telescope built by her father.
“As a young child I never thought I’d end up working on planetary spacecraft missions and science, so I can’t quite believe I’m actually taking on this position. In this role I look forward to engaging the general public in how exciting astronomy is, how important it and its outcomes are to our everyday life,” Dougherty said.
Dougherty is a designer and operator of instruments to measure magnetic fields on space probes like the European Space Agency and NASA.
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One of her major achievements is noticing a “tiny anomaly” in the measurement of the magnetic field on the Cassini spacecraft. Enceladus is now scientifically the most important moon in our solar system to find traces of alien life.
“I didn’t sleep for the first couple of nights beforehand. Imagine if we hadn’t seen anything. No one would have believed anything I said ever again. But we saw that, instead of an atmosphere, it was a water vapour coming out of the south pole,” the scientist said.
In 1834, the Astronomer Royal post was also established in Scotland. Catherine Heyman, an astrophysicist at the University of Edinburgh, became the first female there to hold this title in 2021.
Who was the first lady astronomer?
Caroline Herschel was the first lady astronomer. Her work includes discovering and cataloguing astronomical objects.
