• Question: Can anyone send a space camera or something to another solar system to see life in other solar systems? please answer this question!

    Asked by aliahana to Amy, Grant, Martin, Shawn, Usman on 9 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Grant Kennedy

      Grant Kennedy answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      We’d really love to send a camera to another Solar System, the main reason we haven’t yet is that they’re so far away and it would take a REALLY long time for the camera to get there. Another problem is that even if the camera got there safely and still worked, it wouldn’t be able to send the pictures back because it’s too far and the signal would be too weak to make it!

      The closest star that we might do this for is alpha Centauri, and that’s 4 light years away (4 years at the speed of light). We can’t make spacecraft go anywhere near that fast…

      Voyager 1 is a spacecraft that was launched in 1977 (so 35 years ago) and is only now getting to the outskirts of our Solar System. So st this rate, getting to alpha Centauri would take nearly 100,000 years. Voyager 1 is only going to work for about another ten years, so even if it did make it we wouldn’t be able to communicate with it.

      You can see how far away Voyager 1 & 2 are here.
      http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/index.html

      g

    • Photo: Martin Archer

      Martin Archer answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      Don’t forget of course we can see other solar systems from here with ground based telescopes and the Hubble space telescope and have shown us how beautiful the Universe really is. Whilst we can’t see pictures of planets around other stars, we’ve found hundreds of them in the last couple of years by seeing their effects on the stars and we’re getting better and better at finding them!

    • Photo: Shawn Domagal-Goldman

      Shawn Domagal-Goldman answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Some serious scientists are thinking about doing this! But we aren’t ready to do it quite yet.

      Before we do it we’ll want to know which solar system to send the camera to. So the first step is to find all the nearby planets. We’re doing that now. Then, we’ll want to find out which of these planets are the most interesting. (We have plans for this, but are only just starting them.) Once that’s taken care of, we can sent robotic probes (including cameras!) to the most interesting planets. And while all this is going on, hopefully our rockets will get more powerful so we can get stuff to these faraway planets much faster.

      By that time, you’ll be in the prime of your professional career. Maybe YOU could build that camera one day!!! 😀

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