• Question: Can we ever travel to other places, just like the moon?? :) from sara and shirley

    Asked by SWAG to Camilla, Dan, Katie, Mike, Rhys on 15 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Camilla Weiss

      Camilla Weiss answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Hi girls,

      Yes, potentially – it gets hard though. The main problem is finding somewhere to go. Mars is probably the closest after the moon that we would be able to get to easily. You wouldn’t really want to go to any of the other planets as they’re either too hot, too cold or too gassy! You could try to get to one of the asteroids in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter or one of the other planet’s moons. The problem is the further you go the longer you have to spend in space and space isn’t very good for your health! Without gravity your bones and muscles start to lose their strength and you start to receive really high doses of radiation. People are working on solutions to these problems though so watch this space!

    • Photo: Katie Sparks

      Katie Sparks answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Travelling to other places is really hard, your body doesn’t’ like it. Just being 250km above the Earth for 6 months is bad for the astronauts how do it on the Interntionl Space Station, so image being somewhere like that for 9 months (time to get to Mars) or even longer. Also, where would your food come from? And how about water?
      If you land somewhere, you need to have the equipment to take off again too, if you want to come back. Think how much power a rocket has to get things off Earth, then imagine trying to do that from somewhere with no rockets!
      It’s not impossible, but it’s certainly something that needs more work.

    • Photo: Mike Lawton

      Mike Lawton answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      Hi Sara & Shirley. Thanks for your question. I think the answer is “yes” – and highly likely to a close planet to the earth, the obvious one being Mars. In your lifetime I suspect you’ll be able to go as a tourist to the moon but to another planet will remain a challenge for a long time for tourists. This is because the time to travel such a long distance with current technology means humans have to make do without the protection of earth’s atmosphere. This does a great job of protecting us from radiation and gravity keeps our bones hard & healthy. In a spaceship, we have air but until we to work out a way of replicating gravity and how to protecting us from radiation, travelling any long distance will be very dangerous.
      Perhaps the solution to travel to other worlds is working out how to use ‘wormholes’ – mysterious doors ways through space & time. Rather than flying to another planet, we could transport there almost instantly. Some physicists are working on the mathematics of this somewhere in the world as I type….

Comments