• Question: how old were you when you started to love space

    Asked by anon-245286 to Sam, Samantha, Nicol, Lori-Ann, Liam, David on 6 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Liam Perera

      Liam Perera answered on 6 Mar 2020:

      I would say I came into the Space game pretty late. I’ve always loved science but wasn’t particularly good at it at school compared to my friends.

      When I came to university I realised I loved science and realised that there is so much out there on Earth and beyond that we don’t know.

      The thing that gave me the final push was this image: https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/msl/pia19074 that came back from the Nasa Curiosity rover showing rocks that must have been formed in water and that look really similar to certain rocks on Earth. I just thought it was really cool that you can see real similarities between Earth and Mars and it got me thinking. That’s how I got into Geology and Geoscience and ultimately ended up doing a PhD in Astrobiology.

      So I would say that around 18 was when I really ‘loved’ space but I’ve always had a general interest since I was young.

    • Photo: Lori-Ann Foley

      Lori-Ann Foley answered on 6 Mar 2020:

      I have loved space for as long as I remember but in different ways as I grew up. I have loved science fiction books and tv shows since I was little. That made me want to go to space and learn all about it. And when I was a teenager I got a telescope for Christmas and can still remember the first time I saw Saturn and its rings. I wanted to know how things worked, so studying physics at school was good for that. Then I did other stuff as an adult, but I still read science magazine and science fiction books. Now I am studying space again and I love learning about Mars. I knew about the climate and geology of Earth but to see how Mars compares is so interesting.

    • Photo: David Sobral

      David Sobral answered on 6 Mar 2020: last edited 8 Mar 2020 11:30 pm

      Probably the first time I looked at the night sky and saw the Milky Way. I was lucky to spend all summers in Alentejo, the southwest of Portugal, where you could see the Milky Way pretty much every single summer night without any light pollution.

      Between loving and being fascinated by space and actually considering a career in it was a long way! Apart from wanting to be a football player when I was really young, followed by wanting to be a medical doctor, an astronaut, a writer and then a theoretical physicist, there were plenty of other areas I was fascinated by. In the end, it was all about my fascination for Physics, then black holes, and then getting to experience real research just before starting University. I really loved it and it has been awesome ever since!

    • Photo: Samantha Faircloth

      Samantha Faircloth answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      Space is something that has always fascinated me because of its enormous size but I didn’t really become interested in it until I was in my mid-20s! It didn’t occur to me that I might be able to learn more about it and actually understand why various things happen in space! The more I learnt, the more interested I became. It still amazes me that there are billions of stars and who knows how many planets roaming the universe.

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