Dame Maggie Aderin: Space Science and the Next Generation

Dame Maggie Aderin, also known professionally as Maggie Aderin-Pocock, has helped create the instruments through which scientists study the universe. She has also spent years explaining that work to audiences beyond the laboratory. Her career connects specialised engineering with television, books and education. The familiar broadcaster brings the experience of a maker, including work on instrumentation for the James Webb Space Telescope. ¹

A childhood looking towards space

Born in London to Nigerian parents, Aderin attended thirteen schools before she turned eighteen. She had dyslexia that had not yet been diagnosed, and her education gave little indication of the career that would follow. When she told a teacher she wanted to become an astronaut, she was directed towards the caring professions as a more realistic ambition. The suggestion placed a limit on what she might attempt before she had the opportunity to develop her scientific abilities. ²

Her fascination with space began very early. She has traced the wish to travel beyond Earth to watching The Clangers at the age of three. A children’s programme helped introduce a possibility that remained with her through repeated changes of school: there was an immense world beyond the immediate circumstances of childhood. ¹

As a teenager, she bought a telescope and was disappointed with what it could do. Her response was to attend classes in Camden and begin building her own. That episode brings an important part of her later career into focus. Interest in the sky could lead to practical questions about the equipment used to observe it. She was learning that an instrument was something people could make, improve and understand, as well as something they could look through. ³

Learning to make precise measurements

At Imperial College London, Aderin completed a physics degree in 1990 and continued into doctoral research in mechanical engineering. She has recalled the excitement of studying among people with shared interests, and the importance of help when a subject was difficult. Professor David Southwood, one of her lecturers, would sit with her and explain material she had not understood. Her account of university includes friendship and patient teaching alongside intellectual ambition: scientific confidence developed through relationships as well as individual study. ⁴

Her PhD concerned optical instruments for investigating engine oils, including extremely thin films under high pressure. The research connected the behaviour of light with a problem in mechanical engineering. It required ways of examining material on a scale far beyond ordinary sight. The subject also shows how an interest in space could develop through a less obvious route, acquiring skills in precision measurement that later contributed to astronomical instrumentation. ⁴

Her early professional work included projects for the Ministry of Defence, helping develop aircraft missile warning systems and instruments for detecting landmines. These were practical applications of scientific knowledge, requiring equipment that could identify something difficult to observe directly. They form a substantial part of her background as an instrument maker. Before she became widely recognised for explaining distant planets and stars, she was working on the tools through which people gathered information and responded to conditions around them. ³

Building an instrument for Gemini South

From 1999 to 2004, Aderin worked as a project and engineering manager at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, developing an instrument for the Gemini South telescope in Chile. This was a role within the organised work of a research team, bringing engineering responsibilities into an astronomical project. It also connected her career in Britain with an observatory overseas. The work required turning the questions astronomers wanted to investigate into equipment capable of making the necessary observations. ⁵

The UCL instrument, known as bHROS, separated incoming light into its component wavelengths. UCL’s 2003 account described optical fibres carrying light from the telescope to a spectrometer below it. Professor Mike Barlow explained the team’s aim of analysing light in great detail. One purpose was to investigate the quantities of different elements in very old stars, helping astronomers understand how galaxies developed. This was a way of learning what distant objects were made of through the light that reached the instrument. ⁷

The project’s commissioning record describes tests at Gemini South in July 2005. These included checking how targets were acquired and comparing observations of the same object with another instrument, GMOS, to assess performance. Equipment had to be tested under observing conditions, and its behaviour understood, before researchers could use its measurements confidently. The instrument’s development and subsequent commissioning were successive stages in a shared scientific undertaking. ⁸

Observing Earth and the wider universe

Aderin’s responsibilities expanded through work as a senior project manager at Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. In 2006, she established and led an optical space instrumentation group at Astrium, building equipment for satellite and ground projects associated with the European Space Agency and NASA. Her career moved between academic laboratories and industry, where scientific aims had to be translated into working systems. Leadership meant contributing technical knowledge while organising the efforts of people with different areas of expertise. ⁵

One mission to which she contributed was the European Space Agency’s Aeolus satellite. Launched in August 2018, it measured winds through the atmosphere using a laser instrument called a Doppler wind lidar. ESA reports that its observations improved weather forecasts and climate models. The mission ended in July 2023 after exceeding its planned lifetime. It connected space engineering with questions close to home: how the atmosphere moves and how observations from orbit can improve understanding of Earth’s weather. ^{9, 10}

Her work also included an optical subsystem for the James Webb Space Telescope. The International Astronautical Federation places that contribution within a career of developing bespoke instruments across industrial and academic settings. The scale of such a telescope depends on many specialist contributions fitting together. Her experience of making instruments also informed her later work explaining space research to audiences. ⁹

Taking science beyond the laboratory

In 2004, Aderin founded Science Innovation Ltd to develop public engagement with science, including work encouraging people from underrepresented backgrounds to consider scientific and engineering careers. Her university connections continued alongside this work: UCL records her as a research fellow in Science and Technology Studies from 2006 to 2013. Public communication became a sustained strand of her professional life, with organisational support and a company through which she could take scientific ideas to audiences outside specialist research settings. ^{6, 11}

Television offered further ways to explore the subjects that interested her. In 2011 she presented Do We Really Need the Moon? for BBC Two; In Orbit: How Satellites Rule Our World followed in 2012. These titles framed space science through questions viewers could connect with everyday experience. Her broadcasting also extended to younger children through Stargazing on CBeebies with Chris Jarvis. Different audiences called for different approaches, from explaining the place of the Moon to introducing children to the sky. ¹²

In February 2014, she joined Chris Lintott on The Sky at Night as the programme moved into a half-hour slot on BBC Four. When her appointment was announced, she recalled asking her parents to let her stay up to watch it as a child. She also connected it with the evening classes where she had made a telescope mirror. Joining the presenting team brought together several parts of her life: an early viewing habit, practical curiosity and the professional experience gained through instrument projects. ¹³

Writing for curious young readers

Her children’s writing offered another route into astronomy. Dr Maggie’s Grand Tour of the Solar System, published in hardback by Buster Books in 2019, invites readers to explore planets, moons, asteroids and satellites. Its illustrated journey ranges across familiar neighbours and more distant objects. The format gives young readers a guide through a subject that can otherwise seem difficult to navigate. Questions about living on Mars and exploring the Solar System become starting points for finding out more about different worlds. ¹⁴

Am I Made of Stardust? continued that conversation through questions and answers, with illustrations by Chelen Écija and a robot assistant called IQ. Its subjects include what might happen near a black hole and the possibility of unusual weather on other planets. The Royal Society highlighted its accessible explanations and activities readers could try for themselves. The book gives children’s questions an organising role: their curiosity determines where an explanation begins and helps make a large subject approachable. ¹⁵

It won the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize for 2023, with the result announced at Techniquest in Cardiff in March 2024. More than 12,000 school-age judges across the UK took part in choosing the winner. Aderin thanked both the children and Écija, and explained that dyslexia had made it difficult for her to take herself seriously as an author. The response from young readers was therefore a meaningful form of recognition for someone whose early experience of reading and writing had been challenging. ¹⁵

Young people inside the experiment

In 2025, Aderin delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in the series’ two-hundredth anniversary year. Destination Moon, the first lecture, brought children from the audience into demonstrations about the challenges of human space travel. European Space Agency astronauts joined the programme, linking her explanations with people training for or working towards space missions. The lectures treated young people as participants in exploring a question, with demonstrations helping them examine what journeys beyond Earth actually require. ¹⁶

The final lecture, To the Stars and Beyond, included astronaut Tim Peake. Together with Aderin and the audience, he helped demonstrate the scale of the James Webb telescope’s mirror and the problems involved in launching it. The programme also considered the search for life elsewhere, presenting questions for future investigation. Aderin could connect a telescope she had helped equip with an explanation that people could follow physically, using a demonstration to make the challenges of space engineering easier to grasp. ¹⁶

Access to that experience also involved work behind the scenes. The British Dyslexia Association reported that donated tickets enabled ten young people from Upward Bound Metropolitan to attend a recording in December 2025. Marlon James-Edwards and Lydia Banjo accompanied the group, who also met Aderin. Upward Bound supports young people in Islington secondary schools. The visit was a specific example of an educational programme, a charity and a scientific institution helping students take part in an event they could otherwise have encountered only on screen. ¹⁷

A continuing conversation about belonging

Her work with young audiences has extended beyond lectures and classrooms. In October 2025, she introduced a screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind at Everyman King’s Cross for more than fifty students from local educational institutions. The Springer Nature event included a conversation with Nature editor Magdalena Skipper and questions from the students. Aderin explained the film’s influence on her own interest in space. Cinema became another setting in which scientific careers and imaginative questions could be discussed together. ¹¹

She became Chancellor of the University of Leicester on 1 March 2023. The role makes her its ceremonial head and an advocate for the university, including chairing the annual meeting of University Court. Leicester had awarded her an honorary Doctorate of Science in 2018. Her chancellorship brings her experience of studying, making instruments and communicating science into an institution where another generation is beginning its own working life. ²

Her 2026 memoir, Starchild: My Life Under the Night Sky, brings education, prejudice and scientific ambition into the same personal account. The subjects belong together. Aderin’s career includes the demanding work of making instruments and the equally deliberate work of helping other people imagine a place for themselves in science. Both remain central to the story she tells. ¹

Sources

1. Penguin Books — Starchild: My Life Under the Night Sky, 2026.

2. University of Leicester — Dame Maggie Aderin, Chancellor.

3. National Portrait Gallery — Maggie Aderin and the UCL walking tour.

4. Imperial College London — Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Distinguished Alumni Award 2025.

5. Royal Society and National Life Stories — Inspiring Scientists: Diversity in British Science, 2014 report.

6. UCL — Academic career record accompanying its open letter, 20 March 2014.

7. UCL — Scientists design and build the bHROS spectrometer, November 2003.

8. UCL Optical Science Laboratory — bHROS commissioning record, July 2005.

9. International Astronautical Federation — Maggie Aderin-Pocock, professional biography.

10. European Space Agency — Aeolus mission record.

11. Springer Nature — Maggie Aderin-Pocock’s event with local students, 2 October 2025.

12. Royal Institution — Maggie Aderin-Pocock, biography and television work.

13. BBC Sky at Night Magazine — Maggie Aderin-Pocock joins the programme, December 2013.

14. Michael O’Mara Books — Dr Maggie’s Grand Tour of the Solar System.

15. Royal Society — Young People’s Book Prize 2023 winner, announced 19 March 2024.

16. Royal Institution — The 2025 Christmas Lectures, programme archive.

17. British Dyslexia Association — Upward Bound students at the Christmas Lectures, January 2026.

Image credit

Maggie Aderin in the Dark Matter garden at RHS Chelsea, May 2015. Photograph: Science and Technology Facilities Council; cropped version via Wikimedia Commons. Image source; CC BY-SA 2.0.