Quotes from Carrie Nugent

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An asteroid impact is a preventable natural disaster. It's in part preventable because we have the technology, and it's in part preventable because it's predictable.

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.

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.

Our solar system is actually a wild frontier, teeming with different, diverse places: planets and moons, millions of objects of ice and rock.

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.

NEOWISE needed a cryogen coolant to keep its sensors cool, and that ran out.

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.

On the whole, asteroids tend to leave Earth alone. And day to day, there really isn't cause for most people to give them any thought. But despite being remote objects that most people have never seen, asteroids, and the threat they pose, come up an awful lot in popular culture.

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.

If we found a hazardous asteroid, we could nudge it out of the way.

There are physical bodies, physical worlds that astronauts could visit, that we haven't found yet. Especially, there's these close approaches of asteroids. They pass within geosynchronous orbit sometimes, and they pass within the Earth and the moon.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

NEOWISE has two goals: One is to characterize asteroids, figure out how big and how bright they are, really basic information about these bodies; and we also find asteroids.

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.

I think every time we send a spacecraft to an asteroid or comet, we learn more.