Quotes About Asteroids

In my mind, public space travel will precede efforts toward exploration -- be it returning to the moon, going to Mars, visiting asteroids, or whatever seems appropriate. We've got millions and millions of people who want to go into space, who are willing to pay. When you figure in the payload potential of customers, everything changes.

There's a lot of cruelty going on all the time, and I'm not just talking about inter-human cruelty. I'm talking about whole species becoming extinct, asteroids hitting planets, black holes gobbling up stars.

Asteroids are craggy chunks of rock. Comets are balls of dirt, ice, and frozen gases. And meteors are, quite simply, whatever falls through and burns up in Earth's atmosphere from outer space. Asteroids

The first trillionaire will be the person who exploits space resources on asteroids, on comets...

The actual recipe for the asteroid belt? Take a mere 2.5 percent of the Moon's mass (itself, just 1/81 the mass of Earth), crush it into thousands of assorted pieces, but make sure that three-quarters of the mass is contained in just four asteroids. Then spread them all across a 100-million-mile-wide belt that tracks along a 1.5-billion-mile path around the Sun.

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.

The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world's rim; and strange winds, blowing from a gulf no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the grey dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns. The dark orb-like mountains which rise from its wrinkled and pitted plain are not all its own, for some are fallen asteroids. - The Abominations of Yondo

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.

I think the public perception about asteroids is that they're kind of metaphors for acts of God, the fact that we have no control over the universe. They're always seen as these uncontrollable events. But when you look at the science, they're actually the exact opposite.

In 'Star Wars: Episode II,' when Jango Fett is chasing Obi Wan Kenobi through an asteroid field, they needed a big asteroid to shatter into a million pieces, and I had to figure out how to do the fracturing, write the code, and show an artist how to use it.

For war is never some cosmic accident descending upon a people with all the chance and inevitability of asteroids falling like fire out of the heavens, but only the will and work of man.

Asteroids are our oldest and most numerous cosmic neighbors.

Astronomers are using every technique at their disposal to discover and study asteroids.

When you look at the origins and evolution of life on Earth, it's been severely affected by asteroid impacts through history.

The hazards posed by Near-Earth Asteroids are assessed by Sentry, a computer system developed by the Near-Earth Objects Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The software factors together a cosmic rock's coordinates, distance, velocity, and gravitational influences to calculate its trajectory.

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.

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.

Before the use of asteroids, the only significators of the feminine in traditional chart interpretation were the Moon and Venus.

In the past, men had projected their feminine qualities of emotions, nurturance, and sensitivity onto women. With the recent activation of the feminine centers represented by the asteroids, men have been pressured and encouraged to both own: and develop these qualities.

If governments decide to return to the Moon - as seems to be the case - it must be to build villages, not bases, and to do it as rapidly as possible, as it needs to be an immediate challenge, not a distant dream. And if some want to go to Mars or mine asteroids, they need to be seen as part of a new frontier community.

We want to build colonies on the Moon, Mars, the Moons of other planets, and even nearby asteroids. We want to make space tourism and commerce routine.

It was becoming more and more clear that if the asteroids were the schools of minnows swimming among the pod of whales, then Pluto and the Kuiper belt objects were simply a previously overlooked collection of sardines swimming in a faraway sea.