• Question: If you could participate in a project based anywhere in the galaxy, where would it be?

    Asked by jillpf to Adam, Alexander, Aron, Jess, Neil on 11 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Jessica Marshall

      Jessica Marshall answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Well, I have some interesting places in our Solar System which I would love to send a mission to (especially if I have helped design it). One is Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter. It has a very thick icy crust, but below that is liquid water. No one knows if there is anything in that water or not – I think it would be a very interesting place to try to get some measurements, and a great engineering challenge.
      The other place is Triton – moon around Neptune. This has a rather snowy covering, although it is likely to be nitrogen rather than water snow. Big geysers spray more nitrogen into the air. What is interesting is that this moon is a bit like Titan, a moon around Saturn, only colder. Both these moons display evidence that some of the building blocks of life might be present and so we could better understand what makes life begin to form.
      Plus, if I myself were to go to these places, Europa would be an amazing scuba diving experience and Triton would have some wonderful snowboarding! For my hobby though, kitesurfing, I think that the Earth is the best place!

    • Photo: Neil Bowles

      Neil Bowles answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Hmm, somewhere where you are just above the galactic plane so you could get a good view of the whole galaxy laid out before you. That would be pretty amazing. In the Solar System, I think the view from one of the moon’s of Saturn might be interesting, though the rings would be edge on.

      For an engineering challenge the moon’s of Jupiter would be interesting, as Jess suggests – they are tough to explore for a bunch of reasons (lots of gravity, intense radiation belts around Jupiter), the moon Io is incredibly volcanic and seeing them erupting with Jupiter in view would be amazing…

    • Photo: Aron Kisdi

      Aron Kisdi answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      Any Exoplanet (a planet around a star other then the Sun) that is similar to Earth. If it has life, or intelligent life that is friendly and not harmful that is a bonus.

      Truth is we are designed for Earth environment. Venus is similar in size and has a dense atmosphere but is very hot, Mars is cold and has little atmosphere, in our solar system Earth is the most comfortable, other places we would need to build facilities of terraform (using engineering, and plants to create conditions similar to Earth) them before we can go there. However there are potentially millions of planets around other stars that have the same gravity, temperature as Earth, and have liquid water. Maybe even chocolate.

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