![]() Far from it.Īudience question time at a writers festival can be fraught, it can get ugly and it can get weird: a seemingly eternal 10 minutes of angst and hope and crushing disappointment. But you know the gentleman who wants to talk about Lacan won’t be shy. Questions are tumbling inside your head like clothes in a dryer: Will whoever stands up ask an actual question? Or are they going to start with “this is more of a comment than a question, really”? Will they start on about Sartre or Lacan or some other obscure old fella in a manner wholly unconnected with the conversation we’ve all just heard?Īll of this anxiety overshadows the genuine queries: the ones that probably heaps of people in the audience also have, but are too afraid to ask. Or perhaps a mic on a stand has silently appeared in the aisle just along from where you’re sitting. Out of the corner of your eye you’ve spied volunteers circling the room with microphones in their hands. To learn more about Lu and the College of Aeronautics and Engineering, visit editor and former festival organiser Claire Mabey offers advice on what to do – and perhaps more importantly, what not do to – at audience question time.Īpproximately 50 minutes into a session at the writers festival, you might start to feel a little tense. “There might be a joint space force that would have the resources available when events like this happen, but it's like in the movies where aliens attack, everybody comes together. It’s natural that its defense, it's not defense of the nation but defense of human beings,” said Lu. “This particular defense may eventually become part of a space force. With strong evidence of water on Jupiter's moon and a mission probing the icy surface of Saturn, Lu says in about 10 to 20 years we may have information suggesting life in space. With the low probability of an asteroid crashing into Earth or aliens making contact with the Earth in the next 50 years, the United States Space Force doesn’t have many threats to worry about in the near future. But over the course of 10, 20 years, it changes a lot.” It changes the trajectory very small, slightly initially. But over a long period it’s going to go off course. “It makes sure that your car is going relatively straight. If you drive straight, assuming everything is perfect, tilting the steering just so slightly, keeping it that way, changes your steering wheel input,” explained Lu. The purpose of the DART test is to see how NASA can slightly change the path of any projectile coming toward the Earth by using a momentum exchange. Lu says that there is no immediate threat of any asteroids hitting the Earth, but there is always a small probability. “It was done as a technology demonstration, to show that this is a viable solution if there's an asteroid that we might discover that has a crash course with the Earth.” It's really just crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid to change its trajectory,” said Ye Lu, Ph.D., assistant professor in the College of Aeronautics and Engineering. The gravitational attraction that Dimorphos had to Didymos made it a safe asteroid to test the DART spacecraft on. The asteroid the mission targeted, Dimorphos, was not hurtling toward the Earth but was chosen as it orbits a much larger asteroid, Didymos. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) was a NASA mission aimed at testing a method of planetary defense against near-Earth objects. ![]() Though there is currently no proof of extraterrestrial beings in space, there are other known threats that come from the sky: asteroids. That is one possible future use of the knowledge learned from the DART test: defending the Earth from aliens. The Saturnians flee into the farther reaches of the Milky Way and the USSF has saved all of humankind. The Saturnians are defeated by a barrage of tiny defense missiles that send the projectiles back where they came from. ![]() ![]() The United States Space Force isn't afraid, this is what the 2022 DART test has prepared us for. The year is 2122, Saturn's high-tech galactic space force is threatening to obliterate the Earth with icy projectiles. ![]()
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