By Sam Borsato - @BorsatoSam on Twitter - Lethbridge News Now photo credit

World-leading Scientists in Lethbridge for Final Herschel Meetings

Feb 16, 2016 | 2:56 PM

LETHBRIDGE – February 16th marked the first day of the last Herschel/SPIRE Consortium meeting.

University of Lethbridge research professor, Dr. David Naylor, couldn’t be happier that the meetings are being held in the city. He expected it to be held in Oxford, as the United Kingdom is largely handling the instrument they’re working with.

Top space scientists from around the world are at the university for the next four days.

They’ll be talking about the post-operation phase of the Herschel mission, which provided details on the composition and condition of distant galaxies and other interstellar objects and ended in April 2013.

Naylor credited his team and scientists involved around the world for their hard work

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“There are three instruments on Herschel… We developed a spectrometer to calibrate the instrument that was going into space,” Naylor explained of the project.

“When you build something on the ground… you never know how it’s going to end up when it’s in space. Pretty much everything that we had as contingencies that could have gone against us, went for us. We ended up with a much more sensitive instrument than any of us realized we would get into space.”

Naylor says the group is now looking forward to another mission that will be 100-times more sensitive than Herschel.