The Future Of Space Exploration
Do you think space tourism will become a reality?
Do you think the future of space exploration will be driven by the private sector?
Absolutely, new systems that are getting to orbit such as smaller space craft, space craft that act like airplanes that take off, land, refuel and off you go again. Probably even the return to the moon, I suspect, will be driven by the fact that people will pay a fortune. If someone offered you a chance to be the first man in 40 years to go to the moon; that's quite a holiday destination. And I am sure that will drive new technology and new ways of getting up there.
What are currently the most exiting areas of space research?
There are two. Let's start with the one relatively close to home, which is that we're beginning to see planets around other stars. The first was discovered in 1995. The latest count that we know of is about 300 planets around the stars, other than the sun. We're beginning to get a sense of whether our solar system is unusual or not. For the last 2000 years of astronomical history, we've only been able to look at our solar system. If you think about it, we've got the sun, and then there are rocky planets like Earth and Mars, and big gas things like Jupiter and Saturn. We thought that was normal. We came up very cleverly with a whole series of theories that explain why you have rocky planets close to the sun and big gaseous things further out. The only problem is that none of the other solar systems that we've seen look like this. You have large Jupiter-like planets closer to their stars than Mercury is to the sun. We have several large planets in the same solar system, and all of them close. We have planets on elliptical orbits, ones that are almost circular. We're beginning to see the whole range of planets, and we're nearly at the point where we can see Earth-like planets. At the moment, our techniques are not quite sensitive enough. In maybe the next year, or maybe the next 10 years, we'll be able to see if there are Earths out there and see how special this blue rock that we're standing on actually is. That's one thing. The other one that we've touched on is dark matter. Roughly ten years ago, for the first time in a long while, lots of different measurements about the universe came together to produce a theory of cosmology, a large-scale history of the universe that actually made sense. We know how old the universe is. In fact, we know how old the universe is more accurately than we know the age of the earth. We know that the universe began in a hot dense state that we call the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, plus or minus one hundred million years. We know that it expanded, we know what it's made of, although we don't know what dark matter is. We can predict what's going to happen in the future. It's great to have ticked off all of these boxes, but the best bit is that this picture makes no sense at all. We don't know what most of the matter is. There's also a mysterious force which is causing the universe to accelerate, and this goes by the name of dark energy. Trying to understand what that is and what on earth beyond Earth is going on is the challenge for the next 50 years.
Why is there so much discussion about Europa?
Do you think mankind will ever colonise other planets?
I really hope so. I'd go to Mars for starters, and I've said this before, I'd go to Mars even if they weren't going to bring me back. The condition is that they'd have to keep me alive on the surface, but otherwise, how cool would it be to explore a new planet? Whether it would happen, well, it's difficult. Mars is a long way away. It takes probably, perhaps 18 months to get there. So if you're going to go, why not stay? It seems a waste to spend 18 months getting there, then turn around and come back. Whether it will happen in the near future, that's a more difficult question. I hope so, but a lot will depend on what happens in the next 20 years with the launch of private space companies. NASA have announced they're going back to the Moon and Mars, but all their budget, almost all their budget is going into manned programs. The Chinese are funding manned space programs, and how all these things interact, I'm not sure. Let's hope we're on Mars soon.
How can we find out more about the Universe beyond our solar system?
Well that's more difficult, of course. With the solar system, we can explore with probes, beyond that, at the minute and for the foreseeable future, we just have to look. But we can build some pretty impressive telescopes! And the sensitivity of these things is really quite impressive. For molecules, you look in a region of the spectrum, called the submillimeter, it's like very short wave radio. And you know this, if you think about it, because microwaves work, kitchen microwaves work, by exciting water molecules. So that's the frequency you tune to if you want to see water in the universe. If you build a big enough telescope, then you can go a long, long way back into the history of the universe, and see these molecules, all the way back six billion years ago, or something like that. So there's plenty to be working on in the meantime, while we wait for them to invent interstellar travel.
What area of astronomy do you specialize in?
What's the future for the Sun?
What's the future for the Universe?
