What's Happening?

In October 2017 Louisa Arnell, then a school pupil, came to the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC)’s UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC) in Edinburgh, to participate in a week-long work experience placement.

Technicians, engineers and scientists from STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have helped deliver 13,437 ventilators as part of Ventilator Challenge UK, more than doubling the stock available to the NHS.

Craft Prospect – the NewSpace company providing quantum and AI-enabled space technologies for small satellite space missions – is the first incubatee to graduate from the business incubation centre (BIC) at the Higgs Centre for Innovation.

Congratulations to Rachel Buckley, a leading technician at STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory, who has been made an Honorary Fellow by the Institute of Physics, its highest honour.   

The world’s largest space incubation programme for space tech start-ups will extend to the new Space Park Leicester in the East Midlands, in a drive to support the vibrant, growing regional space clusters across the UK.

On August 14 last year, the US-based National Science Foundation's LIGO, part -funded by the STFC, and the European Virgo detector picked up a gravitational wave signal from the merger of two astronomical objects.

An update to the European Strategy for Particle Physics announced today will guide UK priorities in the coming years within the global research landscape. The key scientific priorities are the detailed study of the Higgs boson and the continued exploration of the high-energy frontier, both seen as two crucial and complementary ways to address the leading open questions in particle physics.

The UK’s space industry has received a major piece of new equipment to help get larger, more complex satellites ready for launch. A 16m long space test chamber, amongst the giants of Europe, has been installed in the UK’s National Satellite Test Facility in Oxfordshire