Words matter. These are the best Carrie Nugent Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I think every time we send a spacecraft to an asteroid or comet, we learn more.
Our solar system is actually a wild frontier, teeming with different, diverse places: planets and moons, millions of objects of ice and rock.
People have discovered asteroids in the Main Belt that outgas like comets, and things on cometary orbits that no longer outgas – that don’t have tails. We’re finding all of these unique cases.
If you were to stand on an asteroid in the main belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter in our solar system, you might be able to see one or two asteroids in the sky, but they would be very far away and very, very small. So you wouldn’t have this ‘dodging through tons of rocks’ business you get in the movies.
When I tell people I’m a space scientist studying asteroids, they sometimes assume I’m a super-smart math whiz. The kind of person who skipped a bunch of grades and went to college when they were sixteen. Although I am good at math, school was difficult for me, and I didn’t get straight A’s.
An asteroid impact in the worst case scenario is a terrifying thing. It seems very uncontrollable: in popular culture, it’s often a metaphor for human powerlessness over the world.
Most astronomical work has to do with things that are very, very far away and don’t affect our lives very much.
Asteroids are our oldest and most numerous cosmic neighbors.
Changing the asteroid’s velocity changes the time when the asteroid crosses Earth’s orbit. After all, just because it crosses Earth’s path doesn’t mean there is necessarily going to be a collision. It has to cross Earth’s path when the Earth is right there.
We’ve actually named asteroids for other famous women in history, like Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth. But it’s really this Malala one that’s catching people’s attention.
The basic method to find asteroids hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years. So asteroids in a telescope look just like stars with one exception: They move with time.
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.
There are all these interesting rules about asteroid nomenclature. Once you discover it, you have the right to name it, but there’s a catch.
The best thing to do is to study these asteroids so we know the range of parameters we would have to deal with and also to find them so we have as much time as possible to prepare.
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.
We have a telescope that takes images, and we use a very nice computer program to isolate the moving images. And then, every potentially new asteroid is vetted by eye, so we take a look at each one, and then we send our observations to the Minor Planet Center.
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.
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.
