QUESTION:
Is it fun to be a scientist?  Why?

ANSWER from Robert West on December 27, 1995:
Is it fun to be a scientist?  It sure is.  I like it for many reasons.
For one, it's fun to go exploring--to go where no one has gone before.
Some scientists, like physicists and chemists, explore the world of
things (molecules, atoms, and sub-atomic particles) too tiny to see.
Some (astronomers, like me) get to explore other worlds.  We don't get
to go there, but we can see (with cameras on telescopes and
spacecraft), hear (with acoustic and plasma wave sensors), and smell
(with sophisticated instruments called mass spectrometers) what
planets, stars, and galaxies are like.  We get to study things (like
the comet crash on Jupiter in 1994) that no one else has ever seen.

I like being a scientist because I get to solve real mysteries.  One
of the great joys of science is learning how the universe
works--understanding why the sky is blue, why stars shine, why
earthquakes happen, why people get sick, and what we can do to help
them get well.  When I learn new things and begin to understand the world
around me, I marvel at how wonderful, how amazing, how simple, and
yet how complex the world is. The solving of one mystery usually
opens up another to work on, leading to yet a deeper level of
understanding, bewilderment, and awe.

As a scientist I get to use my imagination, and that's fun too.  Much
of what a scientist does is use his or her imagination, making mental
pictures to help figure out how to understand something.  Since I
could not be on Jupiter when the comet crashed, I imagined what it
would be like to watch a mountain-size pile of rocks and ice come
crashing down on me at more than 100,000 miles per hour.  What
happened to all the little pieces?  What happened to Jupiter's
atmosphere?  What would happen if such a thing hit Earth?  These
things are fun to think about, and a scientist actually gets paid to
think. That's cool!

________________________________________________________________________

ANSWER from Leslie Tamppari on January 3, 1996:
I am actually a "scientist in training."  I work on Galileo
full time, but I am also a student at UCLA.  I am in the Planetary
science program where I plan to get a PhD.  I will try to answer
your questions from my perspective.

I think it is especially fun to be working in the field of
planetary science.  Planetary science is such a new field that there
are still a lot of things that are unknown and there are a lot
of discoveries being made all the time.  People have only had the
ability to really study the planets well in the last 30 years, due
to the invention of spacecraft.  Thirty years may seem like a long
time, but it's really a very short amount of time when you think
that a science like physics has been around for hundreds of years!
Any science in which you can discover new things is always exciting!

Planetary science is also fun because there aren't very
many people doing it.  It makes me feel like I'm doing something
really unique and special!  And to think that we can send a
spacecraft all the way to Jupiter to take a close look around -
WOW - that's exciting!  When I look at Jupiter from my backyard,
it looks like a bright star!  But thanks to spacecraft, I know
that it has stripes of different chemicals and that one of it's
moons, Io, has volcanoes that are erupiting!

Finally, I always like to watch Star Trek and to dream of
one day being able to fly around the Universe and meet other
people from other planets - if there are any!  Our field of
spacecraft and planetary science is the first step to those
dreams!