• Question: is there any plans for a journey to space further than humans have ever gone such as a planet or a comet etc.

    Asked by 962spce38 to Aisling, Colin, Laurence, Ned, Niamh on 7 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Ned Dwyer

      Ned Dwyer answered on 7 Mar 2016:

      There are plans to send humans to Mars sometime in teh future – maybe within the next 50 years. We have already sent probes to look at other planets, all the way out to Pluto and we have landed a spacecraft on a comet to so it can tell us what it is made up of. Can you imaginge sending a fast moving probe to land on a comet which is speeding throug space – and we achieved it. They were pretty amazing engineers which made that happen.

    • Photo: Laurence O'Rourke

      Laurence O'Rourke answered on 8 Mar 2016:

      Hi there, good question. As Ned has said, we have visited a comet and in fact intend to land on it again (but this time with the Rosetta spacecraft) at the end of September this year. But to visit other planets, well we have now got images of all planets and even of the dwarf planet Ceres and there are plans for ESA to send satellites to visit a few of them again e.g. JUICE for Jupiter, ExoMars for Mars, Bepi-Colombo for Mercury etc. There are also plans to visit asteroids but these are between Mars & Jupiter so not too far away e.g. AIM.

      Besides the Voyager missions which are now the furthest satellites from the sun today, we won’t be going out that far again at least in the planned future. However, the New Horizons satellite that flew by Pluto mid-last year is now going further out to image a Trans-Neptunion (beyond Neptune) Object which is most likely going to be a frozen comet. That’s the furthest that is planned as of today, but still this is not as far as Voyager.

    • Photo: Colin Shirran

      Colin Shirran answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      There are constantly plans being made for the next deep space human mission, whether it is back to the moon, a mission to mars or a mission to a near by asteroid. The biggest problem is getting funding and the commitment by the governments to do it. I feel like this burden is going to move further and further away from lobbying the governments of the world to get involved on it and closer into the hands of the private companies as soon as we can realize the economic extraction of resources from near earth objects and space tourism. It’s likely that the first human boots on Mars will be through a governmental agency but once we move past that into colonization (I’m talking way in the future here) it will probably be by commercial companies running it the transport to and from there. As soon as we can monetize deep space travel the quicker you will see it happen.

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