Mullard Space Science Laboratory

By 1966 the demands had outgrown the laboratory space available in London and Massey asked his colleague Robert Boyd to set up a laboratory, with generous funding from the British electronics company Mullard which had helped to set up the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO) at the University of Cambridge.

Dedicated premises were selected near Dorking, Surrey in an oak-panelled house at Holmbury St. Mary, set in beautiful grounds, where the laboratory has been based ever since.

By this time the UCL group had been involved in providing instrumentation for over 100 rocket launches, mainly from the Woomera Test Range in Australia, but with the recent founding of the European Space Research Organisation (ESRO), with Massey as chairman, they were increasing involved with European as well as American projects.

TMG offers research facilities and consultancy to support the development, management and exploitation of technology within an enterprise context through two main centres.

Faraday Partnerships are intended to promote improved interaction between UK research institutions and industry.

MSSL engineers participated in building and testing the Ultraviolet Optical Telescope (UVOT) instrument on Swift.

For Hinode, MSSL led a consortium building the EUV Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) which provides plasma diagnostic in the solar chromosphere, transition region and corona.