• Question: What inspires you most?

    Asked by 679spcc32 to Camilla, Dan, Katie, Mike, Rhys on 17 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Katie Sparks

      Katie Sparks answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      I am inspired by the amazing things that sciencest discover and work out from the data our satellites send back to Earth. I love working on spacecraft because it means we can do more experiments that we simply cannot do on Earth and it’s exciting seeing what mission the science community come up with that they want a spacecraft for!

    • Photo: Camilla Weiss

      Camilla Weiss answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      If I ever need a bit of inspiration I just google ‘Hubble Images’ and let my mind get blown by the awesomeness of the universe (check out the hubble deep field image in particular). The hubble space telescope is inspiring for so many reasons. It was quite a bold idea to put a giant telescope into space in the first place, especially given that this was 25 years ago and putting a 2.5m mirror into space was no ordinary engineering feat. When it finally got to space they discovered it was slightly damaged and not working as it should. So they sent astronauts into space to fix it – in space!! This is also pretty exceptional. Hubble has looked deeper into our universe than ever before and we’ve learnt more about the universe and also our place in it than we’ve ever known. With its beautiful images it also opened space up to a much wider audience and encouraged people to get more involved with science. It’s been inspace since 1990 and will probably continue to work for another 5 years or so – enough time to see its successor, the James Webb Telescope, launch. The James Webb telescope is even bigger with a 6.5m mirror, just think what it might be able to tell us…

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