Good question!
I really enjoyed EarthCARE, it was my first science mission and I was trying to work out which day of the year gave the biggest temperature change over the spacecraft – really interesting.
And Solar Orbiter was great – it’s orbit goes so close to the Sun (it gets really hot) and the experiements look amazing. It also spins around too, when it’s first launched, to make sure it’s all working – keeping it safe during that was hard!
And PLATO is so big! And has sooo many telescopes! They all need to keep pointing the same way, really really acurrately.
I don’t think I have a favourite – they’re all interesting, just for very different reasons.
I work on a project at university to design a mission to study meteorites. We only ever see meteorites after they’ve landed on Earth so we don’t know what they’re like before that and how much the atmosphere affects them. Our mission was to design a spacecraft to carry different types of artificial meteorites, some with live microbes or organic matter, sling them round the moon to build up speed before firing them back at Earth! It was a really interesting project for me because it was my first introduction into satellite design and I also got to do a lot of research into how the solar system was created. Even tough we never built the satellite it was a great learning experience.
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