I’m now retired, but before that I worked for ESA for more than 30 years, and for 6 years before that in industry. All of my professional career has been in the development of satellites, mostly for Earth observation using microwaves, although during my time in industry I did some work on the Hubble Space telescope (long before it was launched) and on the Ulysses probe (ditto).

My real specialities are radar altimetry and microwave radiometry. I was in the ESA project teams for ERS-1, ERS-2, EnviSat, MetOp and CryoSat. On CryoSat-2 I was project manager, and also for Jason-CS, later renamed Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, until my retirement.

I’m still supporting ESA with the CIMR microwave radiometer mission.

I’ve used GMT, on and off for decades – there’s not much call for it in engineering but I was also processing and displaying geophysical data for various purposes.

As an amateur astronomer I’m now using it to produce location maps for my images.