No, not that Neo, Near Earth Objects., i.e., dino killers, city busters, Siberian dynamite. The House and Senate finally had a hearing on the danger posed by NEOs. The hearings weren't half bad, a round of bipartisan agreement almost broke out, and there was some talk of a Sentinal chasing after a Neo ...:
The Silicon Valley-based B612 Foundation’s plan to send an asteroid-hunting space telescope called the Sentinel into space in July 2018 would solve that problem, Green told the senators. "We have discovered 10,000 near-Earth asteroids thus far.... Sentinel will discover roughly that number every two weeks," said B612 chair Ed Lu, a former astronaut and another witness on the panel.
"Assuming that we found one before you got your satellite up ... what would an asteroid that is a kilometer in diameter, what would it do if it hit the Earth?" asked subcommittee chair Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) .... "That is likely to end human civilization," Lu responded.
Best of all, in my biased opinion, we were mostly spared the spectacle of a bunch of imbeciles who pissed away over a trillion dollars and counting on non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction
tm lecture the experts and the nation about "wasting" a thousandth of that on WMDs we know exist to a 100 percent certainty.
The full House Hearing on NEOs is here, the Senate version is here, the B612 Foundation and the Sentinel Telescope are described here.
- A beautiful new image of the infant universe suggests it is a little older than we thought, but I still don't think it looks a day past 13.7 billion.
- We may now have a complete neander genome sequenced and ready for comparison, base pair by base pair, to anatomically modern humans.
- I have no idea how to get in touch with Seth MacFarlane, but it might be fun to talk to him about some space and science stuff. If anyone can forward my email, see first comment below.
