Carrie Nugent

“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 Armagedd...”

“Most astronomical work has to do with things that are very, very far away and don't affect our lives very much.”

“I think every time we send a spacecraft to an asteroid or comet, we learn more.”

“NASA has hit a comet with an impactor, during the Deep Impact mission. The goal of that mission was to study the surface by making a crater and stirring up the surface material so it could b...”

“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 e...”

“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 ve...”

“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.”

“One of the reasons NEOWISE is so valuable is that it sees the sky in the thermal infrared. That means that instead of seeing the sunlight that asteroids reflect, NEOWISE sees the heat that t...”

“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.”

“Our solar system is actually a wild frontier, teeming with different, diverse places: planets and moons, millions of objects of ice and rock.”

“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.”

“I think the public perception about asteroids is that they're kind of metaphors for acts of God, the fact that we have no control over the universe. They're always seen as these uncontrollab...”

“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...”

“When I tell people I'm a space scientist studying asteroids, they sometimes assume I'm a super-smart math whiz. The kind of person who skipped a bunch of grades and went to college when they...”