Quotes About Asteroids

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.

There is enough material in the Kuiper Belt to build anything out there. We could gobble up all the little asteroids, filtering out all the volatile materials, leaving us with bits of rock and using that to make some incredible structures.

the Kuiper belt, a region of icy asteroids past the orbit of Neptune, drawing an entourage of rocks in its wake and splashing them across the earth. The Kuiper belt contained over thirty thousand asteroids larger than a hundred kilometers in diameter, along with being the home to many short-period comets like the famous Halley's comet.

Here on Earth, we're exposed to asteroids hitting the Earth, eventual changes in the Sun, changes in the Earth's climate, things we're doing to the Earth's climate. If we want to survive, we need to become a multi-planet species. That's further down the road, but the first wave is going to be the explorers.

Most of the solar system resides beyond the orbits of the asteroids. There is more to learn there about general planetary processes than on Mars.

In the beginning there was dust, and one day the great, improbable experiment of life will return to dust. We are not secure. Just as our ultimate genesis was entangled with the birth of suns, and the terrifying tumult of asteroids and meteorites, so we are still bound to the cosmos.

The first credible humans-to-Mars plans are starting to weave together in public-private partnerships. In fact, I can say with some authority that this will also be the case in terms of the Moon and asteroids as well.

Consider that the overwhelming majority of those 40,000 near-Earth asteroids are small enough to fit on the parking lot at the mall. And while these rocky runts won't cause Armageddon, they could still flatten such popular hominid hangouts as Manhattan or downtown Des Moines.

Some asteroids have us in their sights. Be nice to sort of go near them and find out what they're made of, possibly tag their ears so they're always broadcasting to us their location. In case one of their trajectories head straight for us, we'll know well in advance to do something about it.

Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct.

In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection.

Some people fear that today we are again in mortal danger of massive volcanic eruptions or colliding asteroids. Hollywood producers make billions out of these anxieties. Yes, a big asteroid will probably hit our planet sometime in the next 100 million years, but it is very unlikely to happen next Tuesday. Instead of fearing asteroids, we should fear ourselves.

Government reporters may cover City Hall. Education reporters may write about schools and school boards. Science writers may report on asteroids one day, HIV vaccine experiments the next, sonar technology the next, a universe without boundaries.

The TIE fighter pilots chasing the Falcon were among the best in the Empire. But they couldn't compete with Han Solo. Either they weren't good enough, or they weren't crazy enough. Only a lunatic would have plunged his ship into a suicidal journey through these asteroids.

Although the show-off comets in the inner solar system are impressive, it is the far more numerous asteroids in the Earth's neighborhood that should have been feared as they represent the most frequent threats to Earth.

near-Earth objects that approach the Earth's orbit to within 0.05 AU, which is roughly the distance that a near-Earth object's trajectory can be gravitationally altered by a single planetary encounter.

We have the capability - physically, technically - to protect the Earth from asteroid impacts. We are now able to very slightly and subtly reshape the solar system in order to enhance human survival.

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.

The strongest signals leaking off our planet are radar transmissions, not television or radio. The most powerful radars, such as the one mounted on the Arecibo telescope (used to study the ionosphere and map asteroids) could be detected with a similarly sized antenna at a distance of nearly 1,000 light-years.

There are thousands of asteroids whose orbit in the Solar System crosses that of Earth. And we have a little acronym for them - NEOs: near Earth objects. And our biggest goal is to try to catalogue them, so we know in advance if one is going to put us at risk.

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.

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.