Miss Hannah Sargeant

Professional biography

During my MSc I completed a 6 month international research project with other MSc students. The aim of the project was a pre-phase A study of a mission to Mars to establish a permanent infrastructure to support a series of crewed missions to the Martian surface, with a focus on ISRU. Personal contributions include a study of instruments past and present that are looking for water on Mars, and the selection of instruments required to conduct further analysis to determine a suitable landing site for ISRU facilities.

My current research focuses on the development of a breadboard model of the ProSPA instrument due to land near the lunar south pole in 2022 as part of a joint ESA/ROSCOSMOS mission. I am looking at In-Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU) techniques to extract water from lunar regolith. In this project I have built a lab-bench model of the ProSPa instrument and I am performing experiments on ilmenite, lunar simulants, lunar meteorites, and Apollo samples to determine the feasibility of these experiments on the lunar surface.

I am a STEM ambassador and I won the 'I'm a Scientist, get me out of here!' national competition for the Space Exploration zone. I was also a national finalist in the 2018 Institute of Physics 3 Minute Wonder event. I enjoy visiting schools to run space balloon projects and deliver career talks. I also help to deliver science activities at STEM events.

In 2018 I was selected to take part in the Lunar and Planetary Institute 'Exploration Science Summer Intern Program'. With a team of 10 international graduate students we addressed planetary science questions that face NASA. The major theme of the project was utilizing images of lunar boulder tracks in previously unexplored regions of the Moon to determine how traversable they are. In particular we analyzed pyroclastic deposits and permanently shadowed regions. A number of conference items and published papers were produced from this work.