We at Stardust are over the moon (pardon this space-related pun please) to be included on BBC’s Stargazing Live programme this Thursday, 14th January 2016. It is welcome indeed to see our research highlighted on such a fantastic show and reach a new audience.
Following from Stardust’s Hugh Lewis’s recent contribution to the BBC Horizon episode on space debris, this next high-profile outing demonstrates Stardust’s impact and the compelling nature of asteroids and space debris as a research field, but also as a topic for wider discussion.
The programme will show researchers working with lasers in a vacuum chamber to experiment the potential to deflect asteroids. It will also feature a light-hearted demonstration of Isaac Newton’s Third Law, which holds that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
In the 1990s, the European Space Agency’s space telescope searched for asteroids and estimated there are more than 1.5 million between Jupiter and Mars, with a size large enough to destroy a European country if they hit Earth. If these are the large ones, more than 1 km across, how many millions of smaller asteroids are out there?
A smaller asteroid would not cause the devastation of the one which struck at the time of the dinosaurs, but even a small asteroid could have a profound effect on a city or town. This is why it is vital that we continue to identify and track near-Earth objects, and also that we create viable options to deflect an object which might threaten lives.
This is also why Stardust is such an urgent project. We use multiple disciplines, from robotics, to applied mathematics, and from computational intelligence to astrodynamics, to find practical and effective solutions to the asteroid threat.
The edition of Stargazing Live, presented by Professor Brian Cox and Dara O Briain, will be broadcast on BBC Two on Thursday 14 January at 9pm. Scenes on the Stardust project were filmed at Strathclyde’s Technology and Innovation Centre in November 2015.
Tune in to this excellent show for an entertaining, educational experience.