• Question: hello, my name is Renette I am in the school the grey coat hospital and i wanted to ask how does space impact earth and will any of the planets ever unity one day?

    Asked by 449spaa48 to Helen, Heather on 18 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Heather Campbell

      Heather Campbell answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      One way is meteors from space, lumps of rock, hit the Earth, most are tiny and we don’t ever notice them, but sometimes they are bigger and can cause damage, e.g. the meteor that hit Russia last year.
      And scientist think a comet hitting the Earth might have been how water was originally brought to Earth. The Rossett space mission is trying to find this out, and with the successful (mostly!) landing on the comment last week we should know soon whether this comment has water!

    • Photo: Helen Johnson

      Helen Johnson answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Hi Renette 🙂
      There are lots of kinds of ‘space weather’ that could impact Earth. One of these is meteorites, as Heather explained. The other major type is radiation from the Sun – as well as emitting the useful heat and light that we need for life, the Sun also emits harmful UV radiation. Most of this is blocked out by our atmosphere, but some still gets through and we need to wear suncream. The Sun undergoes a cycle of activity – over about 11/12 years. Sometimes it’s a lot more active and has lots of sunspots and solar flares. If there is what we call a ‘coronal mass ejection (CME)’ then lots of high energy particles race towards the Earth, and this can in extreme cases cause power blackouts or interfere with satellites! We get these particles in small(ish) doses all the time, and they are what causes the aurora. 🙂 Hope that helps.

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