You would blast off in a rocket from school. Your school would be totally destroyed by the rocket blast, so probably best you don’t come back because you’re already in a lot of trouble right there.
So you zoom off and you see the beautiful planet earth behind you. It gets a bit smaller, and you zoom past the moon, small dark and rocky.
Then you enter a zone where there’s nothing. It’s dark (apart from the sun!) and there’s nothing to do. So you wait. You can switch your engine off because there’s no air out here so you don’t slow down – you just keep moving.
Of course all the planets are also moving, so Mars, which you’d like to see, is over to one side of you and you think “I’m going to miss it” but then you notice that you’re heading to a certain point and so is Mars, and eventually, after a while (maybe a year or something) you notice it’s getting bigger and redder, and then eventually you pass it. Huge and red, with ice at the poles. Very pretty, you think, but you’re after bigger fish.
Another few months (I think? – depends on how fast you’re going!) and you notice lots of specks of light around your rocket and you realise you’re in the asteroid belt. It’s not too dangerous – there are lots of things there, but they’re very far apart. You remember a bit in star wars where they flew through an asteroid field and it was like Bondi on a busy Saturday, but then you remember that wasn’t an asteroid field but a blown up planet and you feel better.
Then you settle down to wait. Jupiter is way off. It’s going to take you a while. You can already see it as a disk in the sky up ahead. But it’s going to be a long wait, so you load up Call of Duty and finish it on the hard setting and you’re still nowhere near. You’ve done the calculations that show that Jupiter is ahead of you (and is not currently the other side of the sun – that’d be a disaster)
After probably a year or so (again, depends on the speed) it’s big enough to see. You’ll see the different bands on the surface – huge weather systems made up of gas. You’ll see how fast it’s all moving. If you’re there at the right time you’ll see the red spot, and how huge it is, and how the gas seems to move around it like it’s a great big storm 3 times the size of the earth. You’ll begin to see a few moons, like the volcanic Io and the enormous Ganymede. As you go past one you take a few pictures for NASA.
Then you’ll have to work out what to do. The whole time you’ve been looking at how beautiful it is you will have been getting closer, and you’ll start to enter Jupiter’s gravitational field. If you steer towards the planet, you’ll hit it. That would mean going through the clouds of gas and going to a place we know little about. You probably wouldn’t last too long. After a while the pressure and temperature would get too much for your little rocket.
On the other hand you could do some maths and plot a course just to the side of Jupiter. You could go close to the surface of the planet, swing round the back and “slingshot” back out into space. If your maths was good, you’d then be on target for heading directly back to earth with some totally A-class holiday photos.
Hopefully you remembered to take enough snacks. It’s a long ride.
Well, that’s comprehensive. I was going to say: a lot of space. Couple of asteroids, a few bits of the solar system up close and personal. Nice view of the Earth if you look backwards.
Most of the time it would probably be incredibly boring. Worse than driving across the Nullabor. Nothing but distant stars and literally a lot of (empty) space.
You would blast off in a rocket from school. Your school would be totally destroyed by the rocket blast, so probably best you don’t come back because you’re already in a lot of trouble right there.
So you zoom off and you see the beautiful planet earth behind you. It gets a bit smaller, and you zoom past the moon, small dark and rocky.
Then you enter a zone where there’s nothing. It’s dark (apart from the sun!) and there’s nothing to do. So you wait. You can switch your engine off because there’s no air out here so you don’t slow down – you just keep moving.
Of course all the planets are also moving, so Mars, which you’d like to see, is over to one side of you and you think “I’m going to miss it” but then you notice that you’re heading to a certain point and so is Mars, and eventually, after a while (maybe a year or something) you notice it’s getting bigger and redder, and then eventually you pass it. Huge and red, with ice at the poles. Very pretty, you think, but you’re after bigger fish.
Another few months (I think? – depends on how fast you’re going!) and you notice lots of specks of light around your rocket and you realise you’re in the asteroid belt. It’s not too dangerous – there are lots of things there, but they’re very far apart. You remember a bit in star wars where they flew through an asteroid field and it was like Bondi on a busy Saturday, but then you remember that wasn’t an asteroid field but a blown up planet and you feel better.
Then you settle down to wait. Jupiter is way off. It’s going to take you a while. You can already see it as a disk in the sky up ahead. But it’s going to be a long wait, so you load up Call of Duty and finish it on the hard setting and you’re still nowhere near. You’ve done the calculations that show that Jupiter is ahead of you (and is not currently the other side of the sun – that’d be a disaster)
After probably a year or so (again, depends on the speed) it’s big enough to see. You’ll see the different bands on the surface – huge weather systems made up of gas. You’ll see how fast it’s all moving. If you’re there at the right time you’ll see the red spot, and how huge it is, and how the gas seems to move around it like it’s a great big storm 3 times the size of the earth. You’ll begin to see a few moons, like the volcanic Io and the enormous Ganymede. As you go past one you take a few pictures for NASA.
Then you’ll have to work out what to do. The whole time you’ve been looking at how beautiful it is you will have been getting closer, and you’ll start to enter Jupiter’s gravitational field. If you steer towards the planet, you’ll hit it. That would mean going through the clouds of gas and going to a place we know little about. You probably wouldn’t last too long. After a while the pressure and temperature would get too much for your little rocket.
On the other hand you could do some maths and plot a course just to the side of Jupiter. You could go close to the surface of the planet, swing round the back and “slingshot” back out into space. If your maths was good, you’d then be on target for heading directly back to earth with some totally A-class holiday photos.
Hopefully you remembered to take enough snacks. It’s a long ride.
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Well, that’s comprehensive. I was going to say: a lot of space. Couple of asteroids, a few bits of the solar system up close and personal. Nice view of the Earth if you look backwards.
Most of the time it would probably be incredibly boring. Worse than driving across the Nullabor. Nothing but distant stars and literally a lot of (empty) space.
0