Love, Fear and Greed: Why We Should Go to the AsteroidsNational Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC
Free, Tickets Required
4:30 p.m. Discovery Station (in front of Welcome Center) 5:45p.m. Planetarium presentation 6:45 p.m. Telescope observing at Public Observatory, weather permitting
Greed, fear, and love of knowledge send us to the asteroids. Most people fear asteroids as a threat to life on Earth. Scientists' love of knowledge drives them to check out the material our planet grew from, including the oceans, find clues to the origin of life and, maybe, find exotic materials we cannot make on Earth. And a few visionaries have long argued that the mineral wealth in the asteroids is huge. A single modest sized asteroid can contain enough platinum to rival Bill Gates' fortune, about $35 billion. And there are millions of asteroids out there. The time has now come where advanced space engineering and new astronomical knowledge can be combined to make exploring the asteroids possible, and potentially profitable. Martin Elvis will discuss how this can be done, making use of the International Space Station and the new NASA push to send humans to an asteroid.
The Smithsonian’s Stars Lecture Series is made possible by a grant from NASA.
Views of the asteroid Eros generated by data from the laser rangefinder. This false color image shows the 'gravity slope' at various regions on the object. The gravity slope is the angle between the local gravitation field (computed assuming a constant density for the asteroid) and the normal to the surface. Blue is low slope, red is high slope.
How to attend
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