Jar Jar was getting sick of space at the moment, if he tried to ride up front, he would not make it. Whether it was ether during boarding, or once captured to be used as an example to impress the situation to the Naboo leader, he would bite it in oddly enough a 50% 50% chance. If he rode in the back, it was another 50% 50% chance of ether being spaced, or the rear compartment slowly loosing atmosphere. Binks complained of this one time to the one astrodroid he recognized, one time he even started ranting, causing the droid to be delayed in its repair duties. This caused an interesting shift for the gungan as with the delay there was no missile striking the ship.
This gave Binks something to think about, did he delay the droid the first time around, how, and for how long? Could this be the answer to the puzzle of how to bypass the blockade? This required testing, something that the first time around Binks would not have been the type to do, but reliving sections of his life again and again had impacted the importance of testing into his mind the hard way.
First test, the minimum time needed to delay the droid so they did not get blasted by that annoying missile.