If I go and buy a coffee, and somebody asks me what I do, I'll say, 'I find asteroids.' And the first thing they always do is make a Bruce Willis joke, or they are going to bring up Armageddon.
There are all these interesting rules about asteroid nomenclature. Once you discover it, you have the right to name it, but there's a catch.
NEOWISE has two goals: One is to characterize asteroids, figure out how big and how bright they are, really basic information about these bodies; and we also find asteroids.
I think that, a lot of times, people have this idea that the solar system is entirely explored, that we have sent spacecraft to every planet, we've taken beautiful pictures of everything, and that it's kind of done.
Certainly what happened to the dinosaurs was not good - that was a terrible day for the dinosaurs, very sad. But I have to say, there are a lot of threats we face as people and, as someone who lives in Los Angeles, I'm personally more likely to die from driving on the freeway than I am from an asteroid, so you have to put that risk in perspective.
If you were to stand on an asteroid in the main belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter in our solar system, you might be able to see one or two asteroids in the sky, but they would be very far away and very, very small. So you wouldn't have this 'dodging through tons of rocks' business you get in the movies.
There are physical bodies, physical worlds that astronauts could visit, that we haven't found yet. Especially, there's these close approaches of asteroids. They pass within geosynchronous orbit sometimes, and they pass within the Earth and the moon.
An asteroid impact is a preventable natural disaster. It's in part preventable because we have the technology, and it's in part preventable because it's predictable.
An asteroid impact in the worst case scenario is a terrifying thing. It seems very uncontrollable: in popular culture, it's often a metaphor for human powerlessness over the world.
We've actually named asteroids for other famous women in history, like Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth. But it's really this Malala one that's catching people's attention.
I think Dawn has done an amazing job showing that asteroids aren't just hunks of rock. They're worlds - they're places an astronaut can explore. I think the Rosetta mission also did an amazing job of that.
We have a telescope that takes images, and we use a very nice computer program to isolate the moving images. And then, every potentially new asteroid is vetted by eye, so we take a look at each one, and then we send our observations to the Minor Planet Center.
NEOCam wouldn't need cryogen, and it would also be able to see entirely new areas of space. It can scan the sky in a new way.
Our solar system is actually a wild frontier, teeming with different, diverse places: planets and moons, millions of objects of ice and rock.
Becoming a scientist is a long journey, and at every step, I found projects that were exciting, motivating me to continue. My path was not straightforward - when I began studying physics in college, I had no idea I would end up studying asteroids; in fact, I never took an astronomy class.
