Cheap Astronomy - Dear CA Ep. 112: Getting Closer

Next steps, if we don’t trip first.

Hosted by Steve Nerlich.

Dear Cheap Astronomy – How will we find the first evidence of extra-terrestrial life?

Well of course, we don’t know – the question is more invitation to review the various options and rank the relative likelihood of those options based on the information we have to hand. So - it’s possible that we’ll first find evidence of intelligent life in the form of an electromagnetic signal of technological origin coming from another star system.

Dear Cheap Astronomy – Are we safe from asteroid impacts now?

No, but we are safer. The recent DART mission showed that you can divert the trajectory of an asteroid by impacting it with a fast moving spacecraft. The 2022 DART mission demonstrated that the DART spacecraft’s kamikaze crash moved the asteroid Dimorphous by some tens of metres. Tens of metres won’t save Earth from a collision with an object that’s already closing in – but from sufficient distance such fractional shift could very well modify its trajectory so that it misses.

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