Question: Are you prepared to maybe find out something that will change lives?

Jane MacArthur answered on 7 Nov 2014:

While it would be totally amazing to find out something that would change lives, I don’t think I am “prepared” for it in any conscious way, other than thinking wouldn’t it be great to discover something new? I hope to add some pieces to the incomplete jigsaw puzzle to eventually help us understand how the Solar system formed and thus how we came to be here, which may also help inform future space exploration and space travel, which I think are the most exciting boundaries left to investigate.
When a big new discovery is made, it usually takes the team at least a few months to fully write up their results, and can take several more (often a year) for a “peer-review” journal to accept it – this is a process whereby the work done is given to other top scientists to review for flaws, mistakes, errors or limitations that the original team didn’t think of. If the paper passes peer review, it then gets published, which is when you might see headlines in the news.
It is usually kept secret during the pre-publishing period to prevent competitors repeating the work and publishing quicker. This means if a team have a major break through, they probably have several months or a year to “prepare” for the public reactions.