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2020-08-13

Emirati Women Set Sights on Careers in UAE Space Sector

Following the successful completion of BAE Systems and Mubadala’s inaugural space internship programme by Emirati women, Ashwaq Saleh and Maryam Al Nuaimi, the depth of expertise in the UAE space sector is set to expand further.

The women spent six months at BAE Systems’ Applied Intelligence (AI) Labs facility in Chelmsford, Essex, UK – the city where radio was first invented – and have now returned to the UAE and are ready to embark upon careers in the burgeoning space sector.

Ashwaq and Maryam’s return to the UAE coincided with International Women’s Engineering Day, which this year focuses on ways in which women engineers have helped to shape the world and make the planet “a better, safer, more innovative and an exciting place to be”.

During the programme, Ashwaq and Maryam worked alongside AI Labs’ senior space engineers, conducting cutting-edge research and supporting the development of world-leading technology.

To mark the completion of the internship programme, a special presentation was held at the Applied Intelligence office in central London, attended by BAE Systems representatives from Group Business Development and Electronic Systems, as well as a delegation from the UAE Embassy in the UK including the Cultural Attaché, Abdulla Alkaabi.

Focus Areas

Ashwaq’s main project during the internship programme focused on the design of a Switch Matrix Unit for the Tracking, Telemetry and Command Processor (TTCP).

The TTCP is a flexible high precision system for near-earth and deep space communication. It is the highest performance processor in the space industry and has been used to support ESA missions such as, Gaia, Solar Orbiter and Exomars.

Ashwaq said: “I was fortunate to work closely with senior engineers and mentors at AI Labs, from whom I learnt a great deal. I also had my own case study work to complete, meaning I was 100 per cent accountable and this showed me the real importance of professional responsibility.”

While Maryam’s project was focused on writing a data splitter programme that required learning about an entirely new operating system. She successfully worked on running BAE Systems’ special RLAS (Radio Link Analysis System) tools that were designed for post-processing of TTCP data.

Using data from the European Rosetta space mission, Maryam worked to identify discrepancies in the results generated by different tools to ensure correct processing of data.

Maryam said: “It was incredible to work so closely with BAE Systems’ experts and to have access to the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, for which BAE Systems provided the inter-planetary communication system.”

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