Stuart Eves, a longstanding SSTL employee, was awarded an "Arthur" at the UK Space Conference for his Education and Outreach activities.
Stuart Eves, Lead Mission Concepts Engineer at SSTL, has been awarded with an "Arthur", recognising his sterling achievements over a period spanning nearly 20 years in promoting space to a wide variety of groups and schoolchildren.
Stuart regularly lectures about space to learned societies such as the RAS and RAeS, and to a wide variety of organisations and clubs, as well as to schools. He adapts his presentations to fit the audience, and has many, many anecdotes and interesting but little known facts to bring his topic alive. For instance, do you know which human has been closest to the Sun? (Answer at the bottom of this blog!)
Stuart was also the instigator of a schools competition to put real experiments into orbit and the culmination of this activity will be later this year when the LUCID hardware, built by the Langton Star Centre Sixth Form, will be launched onboard TechDemoSat-1.
Stuart received his award at the UK Space Conference Dinner, held at the Glasgow Science Centre on Tuesday 16th July, which was attended by the Rt Hon David Willetts MP, Minister for Universities and Science and by Angie Edwards, the neice of Arthur C Clarke.
The Sir Arthur Clarke Awards have been given annually since 2005 in recognition of notable achievements in space activities.
Answer: The Apollo 8 crew (Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders) have flown closest to the Sun. Their mission took place in winter 1968, orbiting the Moon ten times and making a Christmas Eve TV broadcast, and so these three astronauts were in orbit closer to the perihelion date than any other spaceflight, thus taking them closest to the Sun.