Our Heritage
Beginnings
1 September 1966 – The Mullard Space Science Laboratory came into being at Holmbury House, Holmbury St Mary, Surrey, UK.
3 May 1967 – Official Opening of MSSL by Dr F.E. Jones FRS, Managing Director of Mullard Ltd.
29 May 1967 – First launch of MSSL hardware on ESRO-IIA, launch failure
8 Aug 1967 – First Skylark(3) rocket launch from Woomera with MSSL hardware, Solar Physics.
18 Oct 1967 – first successful satellite launch with MSSL hardware, OSO 4, the two MSSL instruments in the wheel were, one measuring the total flux of soft X-rays from the whole Sun, the other measuring the total flux of 304Å (He II) radiation.
1994 – MSSL becomes the Department of Space and Climate Physics, UCL. Prior to this it was a group within the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
The first administrator at MSSL was Eric Dorlings whose wrote a comprehensive, albeit personal history of MSSL in his Reminiscences (pdf 779KB).
Archive of historical documents
Page last modified on 09 sep 11 08:32
