• Question: what is your favourite moon and why?

    Asked by littlechatterbox to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      I would probably say Europa. It would be between that and Titan, but Titan is a bit too crazy.

      Europa is a great big ball of ice, but since we can see cracks on the ice we think there’s a liquid ocean underneath it, because otherwise it wouldn’t move around. Therefore it might be a good place to look for life – there would be liquid water and energy from the tidal heating at the planets centre (due to Jupiter’s really really strong gravity).

      I really really want to go and explore Antarctica, so imagining a WHOLE world that’s like Antarctica is pretty cool.

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      I have always had a fondness for Io. Any moon with looks a bit like pizza is interesting – and sulphur volcanos too. That would be smelly.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 17 Mar 2012:

      My favourite is Titan, for a bunch of reasons (Titan ain’t too crazy for me!)

      It’s a moon of Saturn that is made of ice, and the surface of it is shaped into hills and valleys and lakes and oceans. But the stuff in the lakes and oceans isn’t water, it’s liquid methane! It’s so cold on the surface that methane can be liquid, so it sits in the lakes and is evaporated up to make methane-clouds and then methane-rains down back into the methane lakes. So its a bit like earth, only with methane instead of water. That means that if we found life on Titan, it would have to live on methane instead if water!

      Also, and this is the main reason – it has a really thick atmosphere of nitrogen, and if you were to strap cardboard wings to your arms, you could flap them and fly through the air! How cool would that be?!

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Can I say the Death Star from Star Wars? 🙂

      More seriously, it might have to Europa which is a moon around Jupiter. It is covered in ice but might be the one other place in the solar system with liquid water, and so might have life living in it. That is really exciting, and a big motivation to study the solar system more carefully.

      (Actually, there is a moon in the Solar System that looks like the Death Star,

      https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=moon+mimas&tbm=isch

      .)

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