Brendan I. Koerner Quotes

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.

The nice thing about asteroids is that once you've found them, and once you have a good solid orbit on them, you can predict a hundred years ahead of time whether there is a likelihood of an impact with Earth.

Asteroids have hit the Earth millions of times. We can see them as shooting stars every night. When they get bigger, things get complicated. It is only a matter of time until a big one hits us. And since we can do something about it, we should.

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.

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.

If you're going to go to the moon, you don't shoot the rocket right at the moon. You have to go at it obliquely.

Fortunately, most things around the supermassive black hole are just going to go around it. They're going to orbit it. They don't actually get sucked in.

Let's find a new way to think about the entire taxonomy of solar system objects, and not clutch to this concept of 'planet,' which, of course, only ever meant, 'Do you move against the background stars, regardless of what you're made of?'

There's no accepted global policy on what to do about asteroid impacts.

It would take an extremely large spacecraft to deflect a large asteroid that would be headed directly for the Earth.

Sooner or later, we will face a catastrophic threat from space. Of all the possible threats, only a gigantic asteroid hit can destroy the entire planet. If we prepare now, we better our odds of survival. The dinosaurs never knew what hit them.

It is wonderful to contemplate how the planetary forces balance each other so perfectly that universal equilibrium is maintained despite the disturbances of the 1,500 millions which inhabit the Earth alone, not to speak of other spheres.

I don't want people to spend their nights worrying about getting hit by asteroids. But I do want them to encourage their political leaders to invest in the insurance, which will allow us to prevent it from happening.

Man must at all costs overcome the Earth's gravity and have, in reserve, the space at least of the Solar System.

Sooner or later the space program will need to save us by detecting and deflecting an incoming asteroid.

I study orbital dynamics as a hobby. My idea of a good time is sitting down and drawing on that knowledge to imagine a space mission from beginning to end, getting as many details right as I can.

There may be hundreds of small seed planets - or planetesimals - which grow in the disk of matter around a star.

It shouldn't be so difficult to determine what a planet is. When you're watching a science fiction show like 'Star Trek' and they show up at some object in space and turn on the viewfinder, the audience and the people in the show know immediately whether it's a planet or a star or a comet or an asteroid.

Asteroid detection, tracking, and defense of our planet is something that NASA, its interagency partners, and the global community take very seriously.

The tail of the comet always points straight away from the sun, in antisolar direction. Sometimes the tail trails behind, but sometimes it's perpendicular, and sometimes it's ahead of the comet like a headlight on a railroad locomotive.

The Saturn system is a rich planetary system. It offers mystery, scientific insight, and obviously splendour beyond compare, and the investigation of this system has enormous cosmic reach... just studying the rings alone, we stand to learn a lot about the discs of stars and gas that we call the spiral galaxies.

The number of people in the world engaged in this search for catastrophic impactors totals one or two dozen. How long into the future are you willing to protect Homo sapiens on Earth? Before you answer that question, take a detour to Arizona's Meteor Crater during your next vacation.

If we do our homework right, never again should an asteroid that can do damage on the ground impact the Earth. We're living in a time-with our technology-we have the capability to eliminate that major shaper of evolution . . . the evolution of life on this planet.

And the earth self-balanced on her centre hung.

I want to launch a globe into space just to mess with the astronauts.