American - Scientist | -
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.
Carrie Nugent
NameInterestingYouRulesRight
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.
WomenTruthHistoryPeopleAttention
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.
BusinessSkySmallStandYouRocks
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.
CoffeeMeFindGoSayFirst
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.
GoodSadPerspectiveDayI AmFace
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.
CultureWorldImpactWorstHuman
Asteroids are our oldest and most numerous cosmic neighbors.
NeighborsCosmicMostOurOldest
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.
I AmEffortTeamEnoughNASALucky
One of the reasons NEOWISE is so valuable is that it sees the sky in the thermal infrared. That means that instead of seeing the sunlight that asteroids reflect, NEOWISE sees the heat that they emit. This is a vital capability, since some asteroids are as dark as coal and can be difficult or impossible to spot with other telescopes.
SkyImpossibleSeeingDarkSunlight
Most astronomical work has to do with things that are very, very far away and don't affect our lives very much.
WorkFar AwayThingsAffectAway
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.
StarsTimeLookFindYearsMove
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.
TimeBestFindKnowPossibleStudy
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Carrie Nugent quotes