 The one over there. So please say who you are and where you're from and try to keep your questions short so we can pack as many as possible in. Okay I'm Barry Hancock originally from Stoke on Trent. I suspect he might be a little bit early to ask this question given the state of the analysis at the moment but I'm wondering if you are hopeful about establishing deuterium content in H2O. I'm thinking in terms of the proposition That Comets might be a major source of oceanic water. Answer. Some of that. The Rosina instrument which I talked about, which is not our instrument but it's based on the orbiter has already made some deuterium hydrogen measurements. But of course they are from afar. It would be very nice to make the measurements on the ground and certainly our instrument is capable of doing that if we can drill a sample a'n gydig y bod y meddwl. Rydych chi'n meddwl arall, y dyfodol y dyfodoleth, yn ym 3 ysgol yma yma yma yma yma yma yma. Felly yw y gallu fod. Efallai y gallu fod yn siŵr fawr yn ymwyfnol o fwyfnol. Felly, y fwyfnol, ac rwy'n cael bod fwyfnol yw yw'r fwyfnol. A wnaeth yw'r fwyfnol sy'n meddwl i'r komfysgion yn y fwyfnol. But I think these are still early days and the resina instrument will continue to keep making measurements for months on end so we'll see how that changes over time. Okay, another question. Yes, lady? There. Just get the mic to you. I'm Rita Egon and I live just down the road in Hatton Regis. I'm always fascinated by how far you can travel in space with very small equipment. The last speaker intrigued me because I'm disabled. To this day I can't find a piece of equipment that's light enough to allow me to travel around the world and put my equipment into a car without fracturing my spine. I would have thought that by now, and what I would like you to do is to actually look at all the needs of disabled people with the research that you've done, because a lot of our equipment really is almost 19th century. I just wondered if you might respond to anything that you know about that might help us. Well, to bring it back to the dogs and the sniffing analogy. One of the medical detection dogs in Milton Keynes are actually used to pick up people having episodes that fits with Epidiabetes or other kind of things, and so the dogs are incredible. They can inform the owner, basically, before they actually have a problem. One of the things we're interested in looking at is whether or not we can use the dog as a scientist. Currently we don't know what the chemical signatures the dogs are picking up are. Can we put Ptolemy-type technology onto a dog and the dog switches machine on because they know the person's about to have an episode? Can we then analyse the samples in the laboratory and build a portable system that could then be used by these people? Instead of having a dog, you could actually have a machine that you wore and picked up the same signatures. So we are starting to do it, but you're right, there's plenty of activities. OK. There's a question at the back, please. And after that, who else wants to ask a question? One in the front. Yes, so one at the back. Chris Horwyd. I'd just be very interested if you could talk a little bit about, as you see the comet heading towards the sun, what analysis or what do you expect to start happening from the orbiter and any analysis that will come from the comet itself? Well, from the orbiter, we're obviously immersed in the coma and you noticed in the image I took where the dust particles were being detected. They were essentially like three different spheres of orbit. And that's because gradually with time the spacecraft will pull away as the activity builds up. But of course it will still be within the coma making measurements. So the kind of things that we saw from the dust experiments and from Rosina and the other instruments measuring the composition of the gases will allow us to essentially make measurements all around the comet of how the composition and the structure of the coma changes with time. That's something that we've never been able to do before. We've had detailed measurements through five or six different comets with different missions, but essentially a snapshot at one moment. And of course we don't know how those things evolve. So what obviously you can do with the cameras is look and see if you can see changes on the surface because we want to understand how the ice evaporate again. Will we actually see the surface eroding? As an indicator, if you work out the mass loss from a comet and extrapolate that through the whole of the encounter around the sun if it were measured all over it might be about this deep across the entire surface. And yet we know that it probably isn't going to be active on the whole surface and therefore certain areas we're going to lose even more material than that. So you should be able to see real physical changes to some of these features on the comet as you go around. Of course ideally what we'd like, and Ian I'm sure he's hoping for, is that the sunlight on the Phili lander increases intensity and time so that the batteries can be powered up and it can then transmit back to the spacecraft. And then there's hope that we can make more measurements. Even if you can't dig into the surface Ptolymy can make sniffing measurements and again see how the gases that are being released from the surface are evolving. And if that ice wall gets hot, that's going to vaporise and we could see very exciting things. It may even launch Phili back off the surface again. So the thing is because we've never seen this process close up before we don't know what's going to happen and I'm sure we can all project actually what will happen will be something different and exciting and we're just looking forward to that over the next few months. Gentleman in the front. Thank you for this opportunity to come here and listen to you guys talk about this amazing event that's happened in our lifetimes. I've always just wondered, there's two things, two parts to my question, I've always just wondered so you've got all this information, you've now worked out how the solar system was formed or how comets are formed. What are you going to do with all that information? I'm going to change things. But then I was much encouraged by the last speaker and the things that we are able to do with the technology that we sent out into space. And I was just wondering, you know, I know in the Middle East they're trying to work out a person who's a suicide bomber and he walks through a checkpoint and they're able to somehow detect from some sort of chemical signature on that person whether he's carrying munitions. Are you going to be able to take this for us? Because it looks like this kind of violence is spreading to Europe as well now. Do you think this is something you would consider using your technology for? A pretty big question there. We have looked at it, yes, and the reality is there are better detectives out there. So again, it's very important to realise what the strengths of our systems are and potentially what the weaknesses are. The beauty of our mass spectrometry sees everything, it sees everything. So you have to build the inlet systems. By building an inlet system it makes it more complex and there are other solutions out there that are more appropriate. Any other questions? Yes, please go ahead. There's another aspect to this and that is by learning about comets, what they look like, what they're made of and all this kind of stuff. I mean we're interested in it for its pure academic reasons. Taf is obviously crossed the wall and wants to make millions, but he started on this side, you know. I don't pay me enough. But you can see, I don't think, you don't need to be an expert to realise this comet is going to split in half at some point. Maybe not on this passage, but eventually it will do. So comets are doing some strange things. They're very dynamic and very active. And clearly over the history of the earth they've impacted the earth. Now you can imagine, you saw that thing on the top of Milton Keynes there. It just missed Netherfield by the way which is where I first lived in Milton Keynes. But clearly if something like this comes down onto the earth it will probably do for civilisation. I mean quite apart from the specific thing you were asking about. So understanding what the enemy looks like in terms of comets is actually quite important and I think progressively, you know, eventually our civilisation will face a threat that we can track and we'll know that a body is going to come and hit us. We can do those calculations and make the measurements. By knowing something about what it looks like we may be able to design the mitigation strategies to deflect it or whatever it is. Sounds a bit science fiction but it clearly will happen for a technological civilisation like ours. OK. Time for one last question maybe. One up there. Excellent. Yes. Say who you are and where you're from. Hi, my name is Jason. I'm from Milton Keynes. I'd just like to say a couple of things really. First of all training dogs to be scientists. Thank you very much. I'm going to remember that for a long time. That's brilliant. Second thing, I just wondered what future events are on the horizon that get you guys excited? Good question. Well, in terms of Rosetta the important thing to remember is the mission continues now for at least to the end of this year and probably into next year. One of the next exciting things is well hopefully in the coming months the sun reaches the shaded place where Philae is and we have a chance to operate that again. Then whether or not Philae wakes up the comet reaches its closest point to the sun in August this year. The illumination is most the activity of the comet and at this point all of the instruments on board the spacecraft are going to be measuring lots of different species all over the comet and looking at different areas of the comet and how they react to this intense sunlight. So that's one of the major highlights. Then as we go into next year the comet is at the moment as seen from the earth the comet is behind the sun whereas later this year and into next year the comet will be visible to telescopes on the earth again and that gives us a unique opportunity to combine measurements from telescopes looking at what we think the comet is made of and how we can measure things from the ground with these measurements in space and that's a way that allows us to test all of the methods that we use to study other comets to get a real calibration a ground truth as it were to things that normally you can only look at from a great distance with a telescope so as someone who observes comets with telescopes that to me is a very exciting element of the mission to come. I'd like to comment on a slightly longer timescale actually I started working on what the precursor to Rosetta in 1986 gives you a feel for how long these missions go from the very earliest planning stage to fruition and so of course while that's going on you're not just thinking about that one mission otherwise your career would be one thing you're always thinking about the next and the next and the next and one of the aspects of this is of course that we have many fantastic ideas and many more ideas than there are pounds to pay for them but so there's a great deal of competition in proposing the kind of missions that might actually eventually get selected and fly but both Colin and I are involved in say competing proposals for the next round of European Space Agency selection so we're already thinking ahead actually to missions that will be launched in the 2020s and from my particular interest is in the other kind of objects for that mission that form close to the sun so comets are the small bodies that make the building blocks and it's in the outer solar system asteroids are the building blocks of planetary material in the inner solar system and small asteroids are the other half of the impact hazard if you like to the earth so understanding that half of the risk is very important too and we're planning and proposing a European mission there's already an American mission which is going to be launched in a couple of years time and a Japanese mission which has just been launched is one of the most primitive kinds of asteroids and in fact those asteroids contain material that we think has the D2H ratio that matches the earth's oceans and it may be that asteroids actually provide a significant amount of the water it's a very uncertain question at the moment so there's lots of interesting science but there's also a feeling that we're doing something basically to save the world ultimately by trying to understand these bodies because it's coming to me when the one that's going to hit us will eventually hit hopefully not anything in any of our lifetimes but ultimately it will Can I just say from my perspective the next challenge I want to get involved with is one that doesn't take 20 years so we're actually looking to build instruments now to go to the moon interesting the moon has become back on the agenda as a really interesting object and you can get there in three days I've got three I think one is counting by millions unlikely two is obviously the cancer project it would be fantastic if at the end of this trial in probably three, four months time if we do have something that could make such a big difference and finally is a project in and I are both working on led by Andrew Morse which is to look at making a micro machine version of Ptolemy so making the gas coming to every column the size of our fingernail so then you really would have a handheld device which you could apply to whatever application so there's a lot of barriers that's a secret you heard it here first ok well thank you very much to our four speakers Dr Colin Snodgrass Dr Simon Green Professor Ian Wright a prolific combination of academics from the open university space science team a round of applause