[7] She has been elected to serve as President of the Institute of Physics from October 2025 [8] and was appointed to Executive Chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council in September 2024.

[9] Michele Dougherty became interested in outer space when she was ten years old, when her father built a 10-inch telescope through which she saw the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

[14] Dougherty's work led to the discovery of an atmosphere containing water and hydrocarbons around Saturn's moon Enceladus — opening up new possibilities in the search for extraterrestrial life.

[18][19][20][21][22][23] Dougherty cites the flybys of Saturn's moons as a highlight of her career; convincing the NASA spacecraft team to make a closer than usual approach “I watched the data coming back with my heart in my mouth because if we had messed up no one would have ever believed me again!".

[39] “All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --"Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies".

{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)The Cassini mission into deep space has sent back some wonderful colour images of Saturn.