• Question: How will all your inventions help us in the future?

    Asked by CharP288 to Camilla, Dan, Katie, Mike, Rhys on 16 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by Kenny.
    • Photo: Katie Sparks

      Katie Sparks answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      I work on science spacecraft, they will help us learn more about the universe, or the Sun, or physics and how things work, or they tell us it’s about the Earth.
      Firstly they may not help us in the future, but science should be done because we can, not because it has an end in sight. Anything we get out of it is pure chance: look at the Internet, it was a way of transferring data between scientist, think where we would be now without it!
      But there are other advantages, the robots we develop to navigate other worlds can be adapted to deactivate bombs or do unsea searches without putting lives at risk. That’s one example, there are many such examples of technology developed for one thing being used for something else.

    • Photo: Camilla Weiss

      Camilla Weiss answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      I build satellites for a variety of purposes and they’re usually built for a specific purpose which in some way benefits us on the ground. Our imaging satellites have a huge number of applications which help people: monitoring agriculture and helping farmers grow crops more efficiently, disaster monitoring, climate change research, population growth, security – the list goes on. We also provide communications satellites which help people find their way on the ground using SatNav. Our technology satellites test out new equipment which might be used in future projects which could benefit us in unknown ways. As KAtie said, we often don’t know how useful something is going to be until we’ve done it – many inventions weren’t invented for their purpose, they just happened to have been discovered whilst trying to do something else!

Comments