• Question: What's the most interesting thing you have discovered or studied being an engineer?

    Asked by Georgia H to Aisling, Colin, Laurence, Ned, Niamh on 9 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Laurence O'Rourke

      Laurence O'Rourke answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      Hi Georgia, good question and a difficult one because there are so many answers I can give. I think a few that I could mention could be :

      – how to find a satellite in space which has been released too early or too late from the rocket.
      – how satellites work in space & controlling them to point to a location you specify
      – how rockets work
      – how to fly a spacecraft around a comet in a continuous ice and dust storm
      – how to land on a comet

      Become an engineer, and you can make your own list someday.

    • Photo: Ned Dwyer

      Ned Dwyer answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      Gosh there are a lot of interesting things.
      By combining microwave photographs from space you can see subsidence in city buildings of only a few millimetres.
      Ships stand out as very white points in the ocean on microwave photos so it is a great way of tracking them
      That all through the year there are huge fires in forests and savanna and you can see them in satellite photographs.
      The list could go on….

    • Photo: Colin Shirran

      Colin Shirran answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      I think the most interesting thing I found through my studies as an engineer was that from low earth orbit it takes more energy to land on the moon then it does to land on Mars! This is mainly due to that we can use the martian atmosphere to help us slow down into an orbit around mars as we get there and a parachute to land there. Where as on the moon we have to completely use rocket burns to slow ourselves down and land.

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