Carrie Nugent

It has only been within my lifetime that asteroids have been considered a credible threat to our planet. And since then, there's been a focused effort underway to discover and catalog these objects. I am lucky enough to be part of this effort. I'm part of a team of scientists that use NASA's NEOWISE telescope.

American Scientist

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Some asteroids have us in their sights. Be nice to sort of go near them and find out what they're made of, possibly tag their ears so they're always broadcasting to us their location. In case one of their trajectories head straight for us, we'll know well in advance to do something about it.

Heidi Hammel

Most people have already seen a cosmic collision. If you've seen a shooting star ever, you've seen a cosmic collision, because a shooting star is not a star. It's a tiny dust or pea sized fragment of an asteroid or a comet hitting our atmosphere and burning up as it hits in, as it comes in.

Rusty Schweickart

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.

American Astronaut

Etienne Schneider

Asteroids are often seen as a threat, but they are also an opportunity. The use of space resources holds a large potential for future technological innovation.

Luxembourger Politician

John M. Grunsfeld

Small bodies in our solar system, like comets and asteroids, help us understand how the solar system formed and provide opportunities to advance exploration.

Brian May

I despise the Lottery. There's less chance of you becoming a millionaire than there is of getting hit on the head by a passing asteroid.

English Musician

Oren Etzioni

It's much more likely that an asteroid will strike the Earth and annihilate life as we know it than AI will turn evil.

American Businessman

Mark Twain

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

American Writer

Peter Diamandis

Mining asteroids will ultimately benefit humanity on and off the Earth in a multitude of ways.

Asteroids are usually confused with comets; asteroids are rocky, while comets are icy and develop tails.

Not Comets

Although common in the asteroid belt, asteroids can be found throughout the solar system, even near Earth.

Not Just Belt

Asteroids can range in size from pebbles to nearly 1,000 km wide; size doesn’t change their classification.

Size Variation

The mythological meaning is rare and usually appears in literary or historical texts about Greek myths.

Literary Reference

In literature, being compared to Asteroid may imply stellar beauty or a celestial nature.

Figure of Beauty

Using 'asteroid' as an adjective often suggests something has the quality, shape, or essence of a star.

Star-Like Quality

‘Asteroid’ as an adjective can evoke vivid imagery and is used for dramatic effect in descriptions.

Visual Imagery

 asteroid impacts, supervolcanoes, and the like. Assessing existential risk is an inherently uncertain business because usually when we try to figure out how likely something is, we check how often it's happened before. But the complete destruction of humanity has never happened before.

The 4 greatest threats...

 and could hit us a few years from now. It won't, but it gives us a chance to study these kinds of asteroids. We didn't really necessarily understand these keyholes, and now we do, and it turns out that's really important, because how do you stop an asteroid like this? Well, let me ask

Phil Plait: How to...

 By learning about past extinction events, recognizing what is happening today as environments change, and using this knowledge to lessen our effect on other species, we can transform humanity's impact on the world from something as destructive as a massive asteroid

When will the next mass...

 but they're actually vulnerable to collapse. Jungles can become deserts, and reefs can become lifeless rocks, even without cataclysmic events, like volcanoes and asteroids. What makes one ecosystem strong and another weak in the face of change?

Why is biodiversity so...

 a substantial amount of water early on that was able to stay put, despite the lack of an atmosphere, though asteroids may have brought more over the eons. If this turns out to be true, life may have formed much earlier than previously thought.

Where did Earth’s water...

 and puts us at risk most of the time these exploded too high in altitude to cause any damage to the ground but as you can see asteroid impacts are not rare just two years ago we had a wake-up call an asteroid exploded near the city

Understanding asteroids...

 out of control hormones or cataracts others blamed a world taken over by hungry caterpillars the answers eluded experts until natal 18 when two scientists working here discovered a clue the link to it being an asteroid

Why the Dinosaurs’...

 was already in severe decline by the time the asteroid struck. However, several dinosaur species survived. And some of which evolved to become today's birds. The world has never again seen land creatures

Dinosaurs 101 PIPE National...

 were probably delivering some of the water that's found on our planet today. One of the key questions about asteroids is did the play any role in the origin of life? Asteroids brought water and carbon,

Alien Oceans PIPE Explorers...

 Jupiter originally flung water into the inner solar system, creating the conditions for life on Earth. So thank you, Jupiter. It also likely altered the orbit of an asteroid that killed the