• Question: whats the best thing you have experienced about the solar system? And why?

    Asked by jamiethedon to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 16 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by nazia1999.
    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      I have really been enjoying seeing Venus and Jupiter in the evening sky lately. When the Moon was last a crescent up in the evening it joined them which was really pretty. And the International Space Station was visible passing overhead quite brightly around that time, so I showed my children the planets, moon and space station passing over from our bedroom window one night. That was quite special.

      If I could magically (and safely) go anywhere in the solar system I think it would be to Europa (which is a moon of Jupiter). I’d like to sit on its icy surface and watch Jupiter fill the sky. See the great red spot with my own eyes, and then drill down through the icy surface of Europa to the ocean people think is under there and see if anything lives down there. That’d be pretty interesting to find out.

    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      There’s lots of really amazing stuff out there. I think the most amazing is Titan, which is a moon of Saturn.

      Titan looks a lot like Earth – it has lakes and sanddunes and mountains. But the lakes are liquid methane and ethane, the sanddunes are frozen methane slush and the mountains are made of ice. The team I work with designed and built the Huygens probe which managed to land on Titan and take some readings.

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      The best thing about the solar system that I have experienced must have been the eclipse of the sun in 1999. I wasn’t quite in the right place (we were in France) but it was amazing to see the sun slowly start to disappear and then it started to get colder too.

      The best photo I saw of the eclipse was from a boat looking back at a seaside town in Cornwall. When it got totally dark, everybody must have been taking a photograph with their camera flashes going off . The person in the boat took a picture of that, and it almost looked like the night sky; really dark with tiny points of light.

      There is a lot of other really cool stuff in the solar system: sulphur volcanos on Io; the mysterious crater on Mimas that makes it look like the Death Star from Star Wars; the ice caps on Mars that we can see from the Earth; the atmosphere of Pluto that entirely freezes in their winter, drops to the ground, and then melts again in the Plutonian summer.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      In my work, I had to research all the different types of moons and planets and other things there are in the solar system, to try and work out where would be the best place to look for extra-terrestrial life.

      This was pretty cool, because I got to find out all about the liquid oceans inside icy moons, or the tiny spongy asteroids and moons that are just spinning really madly around the sun. I love to think about all the different weird things there are out there!

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