Carrie Nugent

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Asteroids are our oldest and most numerous cosmic neighbors.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.