Carrie Nugent
Quotes by Carrie Nugent
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Our solar system is actually a wild frontier, teeming with different, diverse places: planets and moons, millions of objects of ice and rock.
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I think every time we send a spacecraft to an asteroid or comet, we learn more.
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I think that, a lot of times, people have this idea that the solar system is entirely explored, that we have sent spacecraft to every planet, we've taken beautiful pictures of everything, and that it's kind of done.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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