Sentences with phrase «so small asteroids»

It will look in infrared wavelengths, so small asteroids that don't reflect much visible light can be seen via their heat.

Not exact matches

The task will be complicated by the sheer number of such objects and by their diminished brightness — smaller asteroids and comets reflect less light and so more easily escape detection.

So if we're safe from the really big asteroids, and the smaller, more frequent ones are likely to hit without major incident, what's the problem?

«There are other elements involved, but if size were the only factor, we'd be looking for an asteroid smaller than about 40 feet (12 meters) across,» said Paul Chodas, a senior scientist in the Near - Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. «There are hundreds of millions of objects out there in this size range, but they are small and don't reflect a lot of sunlight, so they can be hard to spot.

The risk is so small that I'm not sure the enormous cost to efficiently detect all of those asteroids is worth it.»

Asteroids are discovered by small, dedicated teams of astronomers using optical telescopes that repeatedly scan the sky looking for star - like objects, which change location in the sky slightly over the course of an hour or so.

Unlike planets, which telescopes of the era could resolve as little globes, asteroids were so small that they remained starlike points of light.

Moreover, small bodies cool more quickly than large ones, so asteroids presumably would have quickly shed whatever feeble heat they accumulated when they formed.

It envisions the great reshuffling as a brief, violent affair that not only put the outer planets where they are today but also created the Kuiper belt of small icy bodies beyond Neptune, gave the planets scores of oddly orbiting moons, and bombarded the solar system with a rain of asteroids and comets so fierce that it would have cooked all but the deepest subterranean life on early Earth.

The moon is too small for its core to have grown hot enough to churn and create a magnetic field, so researchers have attributed the magnetism to everything from asteroid impacts to measurement errors.

Ideas abounded: using ion engines to ferry up the components of a moon base; beaming power to robotic rovers on the Martian moon Phobos; attaching high - power Hall effect thrusters to the International Space Station (ISS) and putting it on a Mars cycler orbit; preplacing chemical rocket boosters along an interplanetary trajectory in advance so astronauts could pick them up along the way; using exploration pods like those in 2001: A Space Odyssey rather than space suits; instead of sending astronauts to an asteroid, bringing a (very small) asteroid to astronauts at the space station.

In fact, the asteroid is so complex that Russell and members of his team are calling it the «smallest terrestrial planet.»

So while yes, a nuclear bomb could be used to blow up a small asteroid, it's unlikely that world leaders would waste expensive resources on that endeavor.

About a dinosaur that befriends a small boy (the asteroid never hit the Earth), one can expect a great unlikely friendship to be formed, as Pixar has done so well in the past.