Royal Treatment: Part 1

I promised I’d tell you about all the exciting things that have happened to me recently, so here’s a couple to get you started. I’ve been so busy lately but now I’m having a couple of weeks off with my boyfriend it seems like a suitable time to stop and take stock of everything that’s happened. Sometimes I'm so busy just getting on with things that I forget how amazing these opportunities are (especially if completely wear me out!).

Some weeks ago I helped my supervisor with the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibit he’d organised by sorting out a rota for the volunteers that fitted in with everyone’s schedule. This was supposed to be a relatively simple task that involved collating everyone’s information on when they were available from a google document that they’d filled in into a huge spreadsheet that ensured enough people were always on the stand. Perhaps this is showing my naivety but I really did think it would be that simple. I thought I’d finished the rota quite a few times but following several emails concerning child care, suit collection, ‘I know I said I’d do that originally but really I’d rather do this’ and a major mishap to do with finishing times it was eventually completed to everyone’s satisfaction.

The Royal Society is amazing. I’d never been there until this exhibition but I really should have made the effort to visit. The summer science exhibition runs every year and is open to the general public, with one day reserved exclusively for schools. Literally anyone can walk in from the street and have the most difficult and interesting subjects in modern science explained to them. It’s quite nerve wracking if you’re on a stand – you never know whether the person you’re talking to is a scientist or someone who’s only experience of science comes from their children’s homework. As a volunteer I had questions like ‘What is energy?’ and ‘How does the Sun make light?’ – and you have to be prepared to give some kind of answer, no matter how difficult the topic!

My supervisor’s stand was on the subject of Icy Worlds – focussing on the Cassini mission that is currently orbiting around Saturn and the newly approved JUICE mission that will investigate Jupiter and its moons. Cassini is coming to the end of its mission and is scheduled to be crashed into the surface of Saturn shortly to avoid unnecessary space debris, but it’s given us a lot of new science and many people (in my group at MSSL in particular) talk about Cassini as if it’s an old friend.

In contrast JUICE, the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (what people will do for a catchy name!), is the new kid on the block. It’s only recently been approved as an ESA mission, with instrument teams being selected from different universities. Not everyone got what they wanted in the first round so there was a mad dash for unsuccessful groups to collaborate with those that had won the round. It should be quite an interesting mission though as Jupiter is a very interesting system. It’s the biggest planet in the solar system, with its own huge magnetic field forming an extended magnetosphere that is the largest structure in our solar system. Jupiter’s huge gravitational pull has helped it to trap lots of interesting bodies in our solar system, and some of its moons are very unique. Four of Jupiter’s moons are so large that they could be seen by Galileo in 1610 and provided strong evidence for his sun-centric solar system - because if these moons didn’t orbit the Earth then maybe other objects didn’t have to either. One of the Galilean moons called Ganymede is the only moon in our solar system with its own magnetic field. No one really knows why this is at the moment – there shouldn’t be any activity in the core because it is relatively small and cold. Hopefully JUICE will shed some light on this.

Cassini made a big stir in the space physics community when it found plumes of water ice spewing out of the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, like huge space geysers. This implied a huge water-ocean just underneath the surface of the moon that was constantly coming up through cracks in the surface ice and recycling the surface.

We usually estimate how old a moon is by counting how many impact craters are on the surface, because the older the moon the higher the chance of another body colliding with it. However, if the moon’s surface is constantly being renewed then crater counting would be useless- so discovering the plume at Enceladus explained how it could be so much smoother than the other moons in the Jupiter system. There’s a very similar moon in Jupiter’s system with a very smooth surface called Europa, so maybe JUICE will discover similar features to Enceladus or maybe something different is going on. No one really knows and we can’t sit in our offices thinking about it – something/someone has to go and have a look! That’s why I love space physics. 

Moons of the Solar Solar System to Scale (Image from NASA's website). If this is a bit small for you then try this link:  http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/multimedia/display.cfm?IM_ID=2823