{"id":2509,"date":"2017-09-15T11:02:29","date_gmt":"2017-09-15T10:02:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/?p=2509"},"modified":"2021-06-16T11:00:07","modified_gmt":"2021-06-16T10:00:07","slug":"what-did-cassini-teach-us-about-saturn-our-universe-and-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/what-did-cassini-teach-us-about-saturn-our-universe-and-humanity\/","title":{"rendered":"What did Cassini teach us about Saturn, our universe and humanity?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>Professor Berry Billingsley explores what we have learnt from the latest space mission.<\/em><\/strong><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>As Cassini prepares for its final dive into Saturn&#8217;s atmosphere (scheduled for Friday night) it is an opportune moment to ask &#8211; what have we really learnt from its mission to probe and examine\u00a0 one of our more distant and spectacular solar system cousins.<\/p>\n<p>We probably suppose that astronomers and astrophysicists have gathered\u00a0lots of interesting data &#8211; to address questions\u00a0of interest to them. Indeed\u00a0look online and the word is that Cassini has sent us 453,048\u00a0images and has already\u00a0led to 3,948 published papers. But what about for the rest of us &#8211; is there anything that we would categorise as interesting and important. Clearly we didn&#8217;t find intelligent life or a remarkable alien landmark &#8211; or we&#8217;d have heard. But the job of the science communicator is always to try to relate science to something that people will care about &#8211; and so in this case, what sorts of things could that be?<\/p>\n<p>For me &#8211; and my specialism is science education &#8211; the pictures speak for themselves.\u00a0\u00a0To an extent, we all now\u00a0feel that we have &#8216;been there&#8217;.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Cassini\u2019s mesmerising pictures of fissures on the surface of another planet&#8217;s moons\u00a0get us thinking that however big space is &#8211; and however small we are &#8211; the vastness of space hasn&#8217;t stopped us from\u00a0embarking on missions to look more closely at\u00a0what&#8217;s out there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The mission teaches or reminds us\u00a0how much time and teamwork it takes to plan and carry out a mission. Today there are\u00a0opportunities to help children to find\u00a0out\u00a0a\u00a0hundred details that young people love to know like how long light takes\u00a0to travel\u00a0between Cassini and\u00a0the earth, what the sun looks like from that far away, whether it&#8217;s true that\u00a0other moons and planets can have seas and atmospheres and\u00a0if so then how they got there.<\/p>\n<p>We know from our own research that when children talk about what they value\u00a0about being human,\u00a0they tell us that it is good that\u00a0we are explorers and that we have looked and travelled\u00a0 beyond our own planet. It&#8217;s exciting to see and to imagine another world &#8211; and\u00a0how much more exciting when this is the first set of\u00a0up-close distant planet shots\u00a0that you see as a child. Not only nationally but internationally, young minds are pondering\u00a0big questions like \u2013\u00a0how big is the solar system,\u00a0how far away is Saturn, what would it be like to be there,\u00a0and why is the universe the way that it is?\u00a0Want to know what we&#8217;ve found out by sending a probe to Saturn &#8211; try asking a ten year old. And if your ten year old doesn&#8217;t know &#8211; now is the time to turn on the TV or\u00a0fire up the pc!<\/p>\n<p><strong>Berry Billingsley is Professor of Science Education in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.canterbury.ac.uk\/education\/faculty-of-education.aspx\">Faculty of Education<\/a> and principal investigator of the <a href=\"http:\/\/lasarcentre.com\/\">LASAR<\/a> (Learning about Science and Religion) Research Project.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Berry&#8217;s first career was with the BBC where she produced television and radio programmes including Tomorrow\u2019s World and Science in Action.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Professor Berry Billingsley explores what we have learnt from the latest space mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":242,"featured_media":2518,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201,3902,2021],"tags":[2022,2026,2030,326],"class_list":["post-2509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-research","category-science","tag-cassini","tag-saturn","tag-science-education","tag-space"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"authorName":"Jeanette Earl","featuredImage":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/437\/2017\/09\/Cassini-satellite.jpg","postExcerpt":"Professor Berry Billingsley explores what we have learnt from the latest space mission.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/242"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2509"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8002,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2509\/revisions\/8002"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}