I spend about 1/4 of my time in the lab. As an example, right now I’m building a new camera system that has a laser built in to measure the locations of little reflective sticky targets I put on things while testing to see how far/fast they move. These sticky targets are very relfective, so when you shine a laser light on them they show up as very bright spots on my camera, and I can track them over time as they move. This is not like a camera you buy in a shop or that’s in your phone: I have to assemble it myself starting from the lens, mounting bits to hold it all together, and the imaging chip, then write some software to tell it to save the images on my hard drive. It’s like a non-assembled, do it yourself kit!

During my job i get to work with different types of equipment, here’s me in a (slightly corny) shot with a machine that uses a probe head to measure dimensions on parts, a CMM:

Last year, NPL broke the world record for world’s LARGEST ever water rocket: 3.4 meters long. This is an actual picture of it taking off in the field next to NPL:

http://www.npl.co.uk/news/water-rocket-challenge-2011

This year, we want to break the record for most water rockets being launched at the exact same time. The current world record is 211: we think we can smash that by doubling it, with help from people all over the world.

With the £500, I’ll buy the water rocket kits required and send a couple to every classroom in the measurement zone, so you can take part in the world record on June 12th, 2012.

This is a picture of a normal size rocket (2Litre bottle) taking off last year.

The nitty gritty is you’ll be given the rocket to launch, and at a certain time on June 12th there’ll be an app to download that coordinates the launch time, so someone will need to take a video of the countown timer and then the rocket launching, and the result will be included in the world record attempt

Here’s another of some kids checking in rockets they’d built.