Little Helen was a curious child. She grew up in the UK in a village surrounded by fields north of Cambridge. She loved experimenting – but her experiments didn’t always work out well. Once, she tried making perfume by sticking flower petals in a jar of water. It felt logical at the time. Flowers smelt nice. Perfume was liquid… but the petals quickly rotted and left her with a jar full of mouldy brown liquid that did not smell like perfume.

Helen’s mum was a child minder and made lots of activities for all the kids in her care. She would get them to paint art with water on the concrete slabs. The art quickly dried up and disappeared and led to lots of discussions about why it disappeared  before they started painting all over again. Helen loved talking the other kids about why these things happened.

In 1991 when Helen was 8, the first British woman went to space. Her name was Helen too – Helen Sharman. Young Helen said to her dad, ‘I’m going to space.’ Because that’s apparently what Helens did. From that moment onwards, she pestered her parents for books on space and watched TV shows about the planets. This fuelled a love of science and geology as well as space.

In secondary school, Helen felt that science was what she wanted to do, but also did art, music and drama in the middle years of schooling to round out her education. It turned out that drama was one of the best things she ever did because in the future, she would have to creatively tell people about her field and that needs storytelling.

Helen is dyslexic so numbers always made more sense to her and were more logical. Whatever writing ability she lacked, the numbers gave her confidence. There were only two girls in her secondary school class who did A-level physics – they both went on to do a PhD.

In the UK, you apply for university before you get your marks. Helen got the grades to get into the Planetary Science course. She had never lost her interest in space, but her parents were worried about what kind of job she would get with that.

Helen said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll figure it out.’

It turned out that science offers the most opportunities of anything she could study, but at the time, Helen didn’t ever think about what she would do with the knowledge at the end. After university, she got funding to move up to Scotland to study for her PhD in physics. Helen’s particular interest was the materials on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Some of the materials could be found on earth too – like Epsom salts and methane. Helen worked on methane. Here, it’s a gas, and when cooled, it’s a liquid or a solid, but instead of cooling it, you can make it a liquid or solid by using compression at room temperature. It’s good to know this because the gas giants Uranus and Neptune have a lot of methane in their atmosphere – it gives them both a blue colour. But what happens inside their cores when materials are compressed?

Methane is a simple molecule which has one atom of carbon and four atoms of hydrogen. When methane is compressed, scientists expected it would pack like oranges at the grocer, all sitting neatly together. But it didn’t. When methane gets compressed, it behaves more as a tetrahedron. Helen got baby blocks to see if she could find a logical way the molecules could pack together. But like the molecule itself, Helen could find no logical way for it to pack. Methane instead, comes up with lots of bizarre and complicated structures for such a simple molecule.

We don’t really know what happens to methane at very high pressures. One theory says that it breaks down into carbon – could Uranus have a core of diamonds? The more you research, the better you can predict what it is going to do. That is why it is so important for Helen to research methane.

Finally, after the PhD, Helen got what her dad thought of as a real job. First, she worked for a year in a chemistry lab with high pressured explosive materials to ensure they were safe. Short jobs like this were great for skill building and also for network building.

Next, Helen worked for the Royal Institution in London on their Christmas lectures. Between Christmas and New Year, the BBC televise live lectures for teens. Helen had loved them as a kid and loved working on the project as an adult. It was a nice break after all the study.

She wanted to get a job overseas. The Australian Synchrotron had just been built and they wanted people to do diffraction. Helen had experience in this and got the role. The Synchrotron is a giant particle accelerator that accelerates electrons round and round, close to the speed of light. The light that comes off looks like spidery webs. These high energy x-rays can be used for many things. Covid vaccine was discovered with a Synchrotron.

Now, Helen is back to planetary science and can choose her own research. Her latest interest is in the materials in the earth-like geology that make up Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. It has nitrogen and methane in its atmosphere. Many of the understandings we have about Saturn and its moons came from the Cassini mission to Saturn.  The Cassini spacecraft spent 13 years exploring the planet and its moons ended in 2017. Cassini was able to send back a lot of data which Helen is now working with. She is researching the structure of materials detected to try and recreate the conditions on Titan. There is 20 years of research there. Next mission to Titan is NASA’s Dragonfly which will launch in 2026 and arrive in 2034. They are going to land of nuclear-powered drone on the surface and collect samples. Before Dragonfly reaches Titan, Helen wants to figure out what’s there.

Dr Helen Maynard-Casely is an instrument scientist for the WOMBAT high-intensity powder diffractometer instrument. She assists and collaborates with visiting scientists, works with the sample environment team in commissioning new equipment for WOMBAT and is co-responsible for improving and expanding the capabilities of the instrument.

Dr Helen Maynard-Casely recommends growing crystals from Epsom salts in a saturated solution to make small and big crystals. In a container, stir in half a cup of Epsom salts with half a cup of very hot tap water. Stir for at least a minute until the crystals have dissolved. If you want coloured crystals, you can add a few drops of food colouring. Put the container in the fridge for a couple of hours, then take a look at your new Epsom salt crystals.

You might also want to listen to the Royal Institution’s Christmas lectures like Helen did as a child.

You can also read more about the Cassini mission to Saturn.