She began in the Ministry of Defence and the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency on missile warning systems. She then worked on hand-held instruments to detect landmines. Aderin-Pocock moved back to Imperial College London in 1999 with a fellowship from the Science and Technology Facilities Council to work with the group developing[10] a high-resolution spectrograph[11] for the Gemini telescope in Chile, which probes the heart of stars by converting the starlight gathered by huge telescopes into the spectrum[12] of colours, and then analyses them to work out[13] what's happening billions of miles away.