• Question: will we ever travel beyond our own solar system?

    Asked by 326nepk48 to Ed, Kerrianne, Nina, Oli, yoyehudi on 5 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Kerrianne Harrington

      Kerrianne Harrington answered on 5 Nov 2017:

      Good news is that we have… just not with people. We sent a space probe out all the way back in 1977 called Voyager 1! In 2011, Voyager 1 reached the outer edges of the solar system, and then in 2012 it entered interstellar space. At some point its equipment will fail, and then we will lose it, but it will keep going and going somewhere. It’s crazy to me that we have sent something that far, it’s the furthest man made object! You can get an appreciation for that crazy distance by checking out “If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel” (link: http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html ) and clicking on the scroll button to the right. The creator describes it as a ‘tediously accurate map’, and it’s very true. If you click on the arrow to scroll, it takes forever to get anywhere, and that’s at a scale where the size of the moon is 1 pixel!

      I like to think one day people might, but it will be a really long time away. Definitely not in my lifetime, sadly 🙁

    • Photo: Ed Bracey

      Ed Bracey answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      It’s possible now, but it would take aaaages for humans to reach it.

      Using the spacecraft Voyager that Kerrianne mentioned it would take about 35 years!

      But even if we got there, then we’d just be sitting on the edge of the solar system, and there’s probably not that much to do there.

      Mars might be a more interesting option, it would take us just under a year. But then we’d get there and there’s no atmosphere, no oxygen, so we’d have to spend a lot of time and money making it a nice place to live. People are planning on going to Mars in the next few decades, but apparently if you go, you can’t come back!

      We could also take a risk and hope that a planet in a different solar system might be habitable. We think the nearest planet that we might be able to live on is about 25 trillion miles away, so that would take about 78,000 years to get there. Not ideal. And even then, we might get to the planet to find it’s too dangerous for us to live on!

      You’d also need to carry all the supplies, which would be huge.

      And some weird things happen to the human body in space.
      Your inner ear uses gravity tells you which way your head’s facing; up down, left right etc.
      If you’ve ever spun round too much or got an inner ear infection, you’ll know what it feels like if your inner ear’s not working properly.
      In space, without gravity, your inner ear goes haywire and you feel like you’re falling apparently. Lots of astronauts boke!
      Also your muscles need to be in gravity or they waste away.
      Astronauts who’ve been in space for a long time have to be carried when they return to earth because their muscles are so weak.
      Astronaut Peggy Whitson returned from space in September after a huge 665 days in space. She’s absolutely nails!

      https://phys.org/news/2017-09-record-breaking-astronaut-peggy-whitson-earth.html

      So we’d need to think about a lot of these things for long term space travel.

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