At the moment I am investigating one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus. This moon is 1/230th the size of Saturn but it is really influencial in the whole saturnian system. This little moon is covered in ice, and in the ice there are cracks. From these cracks we have seen water spewing out….which indicates there are liquid oceans on Enceladus!

The plume of material coming from Enceladus has created one of Saturn’s rings, the E ring. Just goes to show that small things like Enceladus can have huge impact on a global scale. I like the idea of that because I’m a pretty small scientist hopefully making a huge impact on science!

Where I work is pretty cool. It is a huge house in the middle of the countryside in Surrey and it has been a stately home and a school in the past. Now it is home to some of the most prolific scientists and engineers in the UK! We have clean rooms, a library, a conference room, a swimming pool and a football pitch here. And if you look closely you’ll find the button that opens up the car park to reveal the Batcave underneath 😉

Every day is difference when you are a planetary scientist. Here at my lab we built one of the instruments on board the Cassini spacecraft, which is orbiting Saturn at the moment.

Because we built it we get all the data, which means we get to look at results that no one else has ever seen before! We analyse the data using computer programs, then draw conclusions from what we see.

We present our work in scientific papers or we visit conferences and give talks.

One of my favourite things about my work is that everything is pretty flexible, which means I can take days out of the lab so I can visit schools and give workshops about space, or teach the public to make planetary landers using eggs as the precious payload. Watch out, they normally get scrambled!

I took a really cool photo the other day, with my phone camera, of the Internation Space Station! Its amazing, but I can’t get it to load onto here, grrr! 🙂

I’m in it to win it! I want to win so that you can come and visit me in person! So vote for me if you like what you read…

Maybe I could use it to get some of you guys to come and visit me here at the lab for a whole day or maybe even a weekend. We could make rockets then launch them and I could give you a tour of the lab.

It is an amazing, huge house in the countryside with labs and clean rooms and engineering blocks. There is lots to see and loads of people to meet. We could spend the day at the lab, you could meet and chat to the scientists, then we could build and launch the rockets, make comets using dry ice, control lunar rovers….there is so much to do!

After that we could have a bbq and a swim (yes we have a pool) and if it is a clear night we can have a star show then camp over.

How much fun would that be?

Or I’d like to spend the money on making another movie….maybe this time I could do a documentary on the last ever Shuttle launch, I’d love to do that. If you like my other movies (see my links) let me know and I can get a movie in the making….you could all have cameos!

http://www.teachers.tv/videos/planetary-scientist

http://www.futuremorph.org/scienceandmaths/#/planetary-scientist