Question: What was your favourite project?

Hannah Currivan answered on 6 Mar 2019:

This is a hard question as I do have two!!!! 🙂
The first is being part of the I-LOFAR (Irish Low Frequency Array Radio Telescope) construction team, in Birr Castle grounds, Birr, Co.Offaly. (http://lofar.ie/). I-LOFAR is part of a much bigger telescope streaking across to Poland, in total the telescope has a 2000km diameter!!!! There a LOFAR in the UK (https://lofar-uk.org/), France, Germany, and Sweden, with the main centre being in the Netherlands. 🙂 🙂 🙂 Which I then got to operate to observe a supernova remanent (Cas A) which is 11,000 light years away, Radio Galaxy (Cygnus A) which is 3200 light years away, and a Black Hole (Cygnus X-3) which is 3200 light years away for my BSc thesis. 🙂
The other is a where I made a rail with a stepping motor which flex’s data tapes! I did this as part of my Particle Physics Summer Internship at the University of Glasgow. These data tapes were prototypes for CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) home of the Large Hadron Collider, and especially for one of its detectors called the LHCb ( Large Hadron Collider beauty), its jobs is to detect slight differences between matter and antimatter. The reason I was flexing the data tapes that are to be used for the LHCb was to see if the data being read was being affected by the small flexing it will experience as the detector moves (the detectors move, but very little). This upgrade to the LHCb has been happening since 2018 and will continue for 2019. 🙂 🙂 🙂 Link to LHCb website: https://home.cern/science/experiments/lhcb
I have to say I-LOFAR is my favorite as it made me discover my love for space engineering, and it also made me choose my master degree in Space Science and Technology, and also made me decide to apply to the European Space Agency Spacecraft operations Training which I carried out in Belgium, September 2018!!!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂