• Question: what was the best thing you have done while being a scientist

    Asked by kaitlyn to Hannah, Stephen, Phil, Lucy on 12 Mar 2017. This question was also asked by Tyler and Harry, Sixtine, Heather.
    • Photo: Hannah Sargeant

      Hannah Sargeant answered on 12 Mar 2017:

      The best thing I have done so far is live and work in Italy and France for 4 months designing a Mars mission as part of my masters degree. We worked with the french space agency and with international space companies, then we presented our work to the European space agency!

      I’m also excited about a piece of work I have finished which talks about how to get oxygen from the south pole of the Moon. I will be flying to Germany soon to present it at big European conference 🙂

    • Photo: Lucy Kissick

      Lucy Kissick answered on 16 Mar 2017:

      The coolest and most exciting thing I’ve ever done as a scientist was speak at a conference on where to send Europe’s next Mars rover. I was probably the youngest and least qualified there, so was very shy and nervous, but I’d collected some data on how safe the proposed sites would be for a rover (boulders, steep slopes, etc) and got to answer questions in front of a lot of very important scientists and engineers. It was almost two years ago but still the coolest two days of my life!!

    • Photo: Phil Sutton

      Phil Sutton answered on 16 Mar 2017:

      My main work has been focused on Saturn’s rings and moon formation. When we look at planet formation the standard core accretion theory takes longer than the age of the solar system to form the planets we have. Gravity alone can not bring together enough material fast enough to create the planets. So….

      There has been a theory that if we had a vortex (imagine a whirlpool in water) in the planet forming disk around the Sun (the planets form in a disk of dust and gas that orbits the young Sun), then this would collect up material much faster. The planets then form in the correct time frame. I studied Saturn’s rings and how moons might form, we can use it as a scaled down version of the solar system. From some models I had written I showed that turbulence and vortices in the ring can indeed speed up the process that creates moons in Saturn’s rings. This could help us understand more about how the planets formed.

Comments