Over 400 years after an apple falling off a tree set Sir Isaac Newton thinking a former Prestatyn man is taking the study of gravity to new heights – or depths.

Will Featherstone is one of the world’s leading authority’s on the subject and his work is assisting the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) plan its next moon landings.

Will, 52, is Professor of Geodesy – the study of the size, shape and gravity field of the earth – in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia.

He is also Director of the Western Australia Centre for Geodesy and holds or has held numerous other positions including Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering in Kanpur, India, Adjunct Professor in the University of New Brunswick in Canada and Visiting Professor in the School of Computing of De Montfort University, Leicester.

After attending Ysgol Melyd in Meliden and Prestatyn High School, which he left in 1985, he gained a first- class honours degree in Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Newcastle University, then at Wolfson College, Oxford, did his PhD on “A GPS controlled gravimetric determination of the geoid of the British Isles”.

Speaking on a Christmas  visit to his mother, Barbara Owen, at her home in The Circle, Prestatyn, he said he went to Perth in 2012, expecting to stay for a couple of years, “but 27 years later I am still there”

His ground-breaking research work has been acknowledged throughout the world and in 2013 he and colleagues applied the techniques they had developed to create an ultra-high resolution gravity map of earth to identify 280 new lunar craters on the moon.

“The dark side of the moon is particularly challenging because moon-orbiting satellites cannot be tracked from Earth when they are over the far side,” he said.

His current speciality, which is expected to prove a huge boon to exploration, government and commercial interests , is in determining gravity below sea-level, which GPS systems do not.

“We are getting data four times more efficiently than anyone else,” he said.

Will is a member of a consortium of five scientists from around the world – the other members are from Russia, China, India and Canada - who convinced NASA that their systems would help them in identifying the most suitable landing sites on the moon for future space projects.

“In the same way it can be used in the search for minerals The potential is massive,” he said.