Not All Bad
It's not all bad out here, you know.
Sure, we have politicians who turn into celebrities and then into cats, but I don't want to give you the impression that you're going to emerge to find a planet thickly encrusted with morons. In fact, the thickness varies quite a bit.
Take astronomers, for instance. These are scientists who study space. Well, usually, they study the things in space, and not the space between things, but space, generally, is their thing, so to speak.
Astronomers are important people, or at least, the things they find out about are important. This is why astronomers, like Copernicus, sometimes used to be famous. There aren't really any famous astronomers these days. Well, there's Stephen Hawking, but sadly, he's really only famous for being very clever even though he's not able to move. And besides, he's more of a cosmologist than an astronomer.
Anyway, there is much to admire about astronomers. In fact, I would have liked to be one, but wasn't clever enough; their cleverness is one of the things I admire about them. That and the fact that you don't often see them appearing on Celebrity Big Brother pretending to be cats.
The Stardust capsule returning to Earth yesterday (Image © NASA/Ames Research Center)
Yesterday, astronomers (and other clever people like engineers) succeeded in their mission to send a spacecraft to scrape off little pieces of a comet, collect some ancient dust from the formation of the solar system and bring all of this amazing and precious stuff back here, to Earth.
To do this, they had to make the spacecraft travel a very, very long way: about 4,640,000,000 (4.64 billion) kilometres. How far is that? Well, you're about 84 mm long, or at least you were last week. So, the spacecraft had to travel approximately 527,272,700,000,000 times the distance from your crown (the top of your head) to your rump (er, the other end of you). Impressed?
And when it got back, they had to make it drop the capsule where it had stored the space dust onto an Air Force base in Utah. On a 4.64 billion kilometre mission, this is a bit like dropping a euro onto a particular square of a chess board from an aeroplane. As I say, these people are clever.
We'll have to wait for a while to find out what's in the space dust and what that might tell us about how comets (and the sun, and the planets, and us) were formed.
I'll let you know as soon as I hear, though. Who knows, maybe we'll find out together?
Sure, we have politicians who turn into celebrities and then into cats, but I don't want to give you the impression that you're going to emerge to find a planet thickly encrusted with morons. In fact, the thickness varies quite a bit.
Take astronomers, for instance. These are scientists who study space. Well, usually, they study the things in space, and not the space between things, but space, generally, is their thing, so to speak.
Astronomers are important people, or at least, the things they find out about are important. This is why astronomers, like Copernicus, sometimes used to be famous. There aren't really any famous astronomers these days. Well, there's Stephen Hawking, but sadly, he's really only famous for being very clever even though he's not able to move. And besides, he's more of a cosmologist than an astronomer.
Anyway, there is much to admire about astronomers. In fact, I would have liked to be one, but wasn't clever enough; their cleverness is one of the things I admire about them. That and the fact that you don't often see them appearing on Celebrity Big Brother pretending to be cats.
The Stardust capsule returning to Earth yesterday (Image © NASA/Ames Research Center)Yesterday, astronomers (and other clever people like engineers) succeeded in their mission to send a spacecraft to scrape off little pieces of a comet, collect some ancient dust from the formation of the solar system and bring all of this amazing and precious stuff back here, to Earth.
To do this, they had to make the spacecraft travel a very, very long way: about 4,640,000,000 (4.64 billion) kilometres. How far is that? Well, you're about 84 mm long, or at least you were last week. So, the spacecraft had to travel approximately 527,272,700,000,000 times the distance from your crown (the top of your head) to your rump (er, the other end of you). Impressed?
And when it got back, they had to make it drop the capsule where it had stored the space dust onto an Air Force base in Utah. On a 4.64 billion kilometre mission, this is a bit like dropping a euro onto a particular square of a chess board from an aeroplane. As I say, these people are clever.
We'll have to wait for a while to find out what's in the space dust and what that might tell us about how comets (and the sun, and the planets, and us) were formed.
I'll let you know as soon as I hear, though. Who knows, maybe we'll find out together?
posted by Paraic O'Donnell at 4:14 PM
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