Clive Dyer

I was taking my finals in physics at Cambridge in May 1969 when Apollo 10 first took men around the moon and in July was glued to a flickering black and white, cathode-ray TV screen as the first landing was broadcast around the world. In September that year I joined the Cosmic Ray and Space Physics team at Imperial College to study for a PhD and worked on pioneering data obtained from their Cerenkov monitors carried on the ESRO HEOS-1 spacecraft, which had an apogee halfway to the moon and detected anisotropies in cosmic rays and solar particle events. I also worked on induced radioactivity in hard X-ray and gamma-ray detectors.

The last three Apollo missions carried such detectors on an extendable boom to monitor cosmic gamma rays and emissions from the lunar surface. My work showed that these would get radioactive in space and confuse the results. I was invited to NASA/Goddard Spaceflight Centre to work on the data from 1973 to 1976 and on my return soon found myself working at Space Department, RAE Farnborough, founding the Space Environment and Protection Group with Keith Ryden and collaborating with Martin Sweeting and Craig Underwood at Surrey on payloads for the pioneering UoSats and STRV. We also flew the CREAM experiment on numerous Space Shuttle missions, the MIR space station, Concorde and numerous other airflights. The Team moved to Surrey Space Centre in 2012. Life is coming full circle.