Dr Katherine Bennell-Pegg

Yeah, I think it's quite remarkable.

And there's more to come, you know, with the increasing developments of space capability.

What we're soon going to be able to see is in times of disaster, we'll be able to get

you know, actionable insights, not just to our first responders, but to people on the ground.

Right now, a lot of that data is more predictive or post the disaster rather than during it for the people on the ground.

And that's going to be really important for bushfires and floods in Australia.

It absolutely blows me away.

But it is also what initially inspired me into space, you know, looking up at the sky and realizing that,

how infinite the universe is.

You know, there are more stars in the universe, we think, than all the grains of sand and all the beaches and the deserts and the oceans in the world.

We're recently seeing through new in-space telescopes, exoplanets, planets around other stars and almost all the stars closest to us.

So there's probably far more planets than that, you know, so much out there remains to be explored.

And the knowledge and discoveries we can gain from that exploration, I think, are also infinite.

But ultimately,

Yes, we explore for those discoveries, both pure science and almost the philosophical, to practical applications, but we ultimately explore space to benefit us here on Earth, right?

When astronauts went around the moon for the first time on Apollo 8, so the equivalent mission to Artemis II, but on Apollo, way back in 1968, they took that really famous Earthrise image, the first ever colour image of the Earth,

And they were amazed with our oasis in the black nothingness of space and felt that we are really not on Earth but of Earth.

And there was a famous quote that they said when they returned, which was, we came all this way to explore the moon, but instead we discovered the Earth.

And that made NASA realize that Earth itself is a destination for space exploration.

So we turned our satellites inwards.