Professor Monica Grady
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2015
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University.
Well-known in scientific circles, at NASA and the European Space Agency, she came to the attention of the general public with her enthusiastic celebration when, as part of the Rosetta project, the probe Philae became the first-ever spacecraft to land on a comet - 67P - in November 2014. The spacecraft had taken ten years to journey through space and a decade was spent on the preparations.
She was born in 1958 in Leeds as the eldest of eight children. She studied chemistry and geology at Durham University and did her PhD on carbon in meteorites at Cambridge, where she worked closely with Professor Colin Pillinger on the Beagle 2 project to Mars. She first worked at the OU in 1983 before joining the Department of Mineralogy of the Natural History Museum, becoming Head of the Meteorites and Cosmic Mineralogy Division. She is married to Professor Ian Wright who is one of the lead scientists on the Rosetta cometary mission and they have one son. She was awarded a CBE in 2012 for services to space sciences and asteroid (4731) was named "Monicagrady" in her honour.
Producer: Cathy Drysdale.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:10.0 | For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:17.0 | Radio 4. My cast away this week is the space scientist Professor Monica Grady. Life on Mars and |
| 0:39.2 | stardust aren't two of her chosen discs but rather the subjects she has devoted her working life to understanding. |
| 0:46.1 | The geochemistry of primitive meteorites and the possibilities of life elsewhere in the |
| 0:50.5 | Cosmos have been her passion and preoccupation for 35 years. |
| 0:55.5 | When the robot probe FELI made history landing on a comet last year, she was part of the |
| 1:00.5 | European Space Agency team that made it happen. The venerable |
| 1:04.1 | professor's reaction of ecstatic jumps, fist pumps, whoops and even a few tears |
| 1:08.1 | were all captured by the TV news cameras and went viral. No wonder she was chuffed. The spacecraft had taken 10 years to |
| 1:15.5 | make its journey and safely reach its destination. She grew up the eldest of eight |
| 1:21.0 | children in Leeds and her first research project |
| 1:24.2 | was good preparation for the patience and precision her profession now demands |
| 1:28.1 | as a youngster each night |
| 1:30.0 | she'd note down the precise time the sun went down and the street lamps outside her bedroom window came on. |
| 1:36.4 | She did it for a year. |
| 1:38.4 | Awarded the CBE for services to space science back in 2012, She also has an asteroid named after her. |
| 1:45.1 | She says, no way was I brilliant at school and not many of us did science. I was near the |
| 1:50.8 | top of the class but worked hard for it. I was a studious little swat. So welcome Professor Monica Grady. We are talking today only two weeks after this feline lander started speaking. It's |
| 2:05.8 | woken up unexpectedly after seven months. It said hello earth can you hear me |
| 2:11.3 | which was such a charming thing to say. Had you given up hope? |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.