Zitat des Tages von Carrie Nugent:
I think that, a lot of times, people have this idea that the solar system is entirely explored, that we have sent spacecraft to every planet, we've taken beautiful pictures of everything, and that it's kind of done.
I think Dawn has done an amazing job showing that asteroids aren't just hunks of rock. They're worlds - they're places an astronaut can explore. I think the Rosetta mission also did an amazing job of that.
I love studying asteroids because they are relatively simple, just rocks in space. They can be understood with physics and described with elegant equations. For the most part, they are serene celestial bodies.
Our solar system is actually a wild frontier, teeming with different, diverse places: planets and moons, millions of objects of ice and rock.
I think every time we send a spacecraft to an asteroid or comet, we learn more.
Most astronomical work has to do with things that are very, very far away and don't affect our lives very much.
NEOWISE needed a cryogen coolant to keep its sensors cool, and that ran out.
If I go and buy a coffee, and somebody asks me what I do, I'll say, 'I find asteroids.' And the first thing they always do is make a Bruce Willis joke, or they are going to bring up Armageddon.
Becoming a scientist is a long journey, and at every step, I found projects that were exciting, motivating me to continue. My path was not straightforward - when I began studying physics in college, I had no idea I would end up studying asteroids; in fact, I never took an astronomy class.
By searching the sky now, me and other asteroid hunters hope to give us the early warning - ideally decades - that we need. But that strategy of focused searching hasn't stopped people from thinking about what we might do if an asteroid was on its way toward us.
It has only been within my lifetime that asteroids have been considered a credible threat to our planet. And since then, there's been a focused effort underway to discover and catalog these objects. I am lucky enough to be part of this effort. I'm part of a team of scientists that use NASA's NEOWISE telescope.
NEOCam wouldn't need cryogen, and it would also be able to see entirely new areas of space. It can scan the sky in a new way.
If we found a hazardous asteroid, we could nudge it out of the way.
Certainly what happened to the dinosaurs was not good - that was a terrible day for the dinosaurs, very sad. But I have to say, there are a lot of threats we face as people and, as someone who lives in Los Angeles, I'm personally more likely to die from driving on the freeway than I am from an asteroid, so you have to put that risk in perspective.
There's been a lot of really great intensive research into earthquakes, but we can't predict an earthquake down to the day. We can't predict where a hurricane is going to be a month in advance.
NASA has hit a comet with an impactor, during the Deep Impact mission. The goal of that mission was to study the surface by making a crater and stirring up the surface material so it could be studied.
Back in the day, I've heard, particularly with the near-Earth asteroids, there were some asteroid hunters that knew the names of every one.
