The 365 Days Of Astronomy, The Daily Podcast Of The International Year Of Astronomy 2009

Next steps, if we don’t trip first. Hosted by Steve Nerlich.   Dear Cheap Astronomy – How will we find the first evidence of extra-terrestrial life? Well of course, we don’t know – the question is more invitation to review the various options and rank the relative likelihood of those options based on the information we have to hand. So - it’s possible that we’ll first find evidence of intelligent life in the form of an electromagnetic signal of technological origin coming from another star system.   Dear Cheap Astronomy – Are we safe from asteroid impacts now? No, but we are safer. The recent DART mission showed that you can divert the trajectory of an asteroid by impacting it with a fast moving spacecraft. The 2022 DART mission demonstrated that the DART spacecraft’s kamikaze crash moved the asteroid Dimorphous by some tens of metres. Tens of metres won’t save Earth from a collision with an object that’s already closing in – but from sufficient distance such fractional shift could very well modify its trajec