Bad Astronomer

Just checked out the Bad Astronomer blog that was suggested as an option for the website review. Having taken a closer look at it now I kinda wish I'd chosen to do a review of it. This guy's writing is so much more accessible to me than the websites I did review.

I read three of his entries. One was on the above video of silly putty, which had been mixed with iron oxide, "eating" a magnet. It's a pretty cool video and the blog's author Phil Plait explains some of it's scientific implications well. Really though I just kept thinking it would be a cool thing to do with the high school kids I tutor.

The second article was about the difference in the nights sky in the southern hemisphere. Not doing much star gazing myself I didn't find this one all that interesting.

The third one though was pretty intersting. This was about a NASA mission to bring an asteroid close enough to the earth that we can study it. Plait spent quite a bit of time talking about this one. He discussed how it could be done, why it should be done, and what the obstacles are. He included the far out drawing below of one of the capture options. If I understand it correctly this will match the movements of the asteroid pull it into it's large bag thing, close the bag then make constant adjustments until the asteroid settles down.

Plait's primary conclusion was that, although this was an incredibly cool idea, it might not really be feasible.

His skepticism was based on a few factors but primarily it came down to him not believing NASA had much of a plan or the money to do it. They'd recently announced that the white house will give $100 million dollars to this project. Not much considering how much it will cost.

A couple things that caught my eye while reading this this where

1) It's really hard to see small things in space like astroids.

2) Plait seems to think that the best option to get people up to actually look at this astroid if we get it near us is SpaceX, the privately owned space program. That's pretty amazing.

3)All this stuff is so incredibly expensive. It must be surreal to be an astronaut and know that a country is spending millions of dollars on your existence every day your up there.