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Talk in Luxembourgish language by Matt Dawson, research associate of the Astrophysics department of the National Museum of Natural History on the occasion of Asteroid Day
Since the dawn of time Man has looked at the stars and dreamed of touching them……
We live in the most amazing time in history. The first man-made object (Sputnik) was launched in 1957, and in 2012 the voyager spacecraft left our Solar System. Even in my own life-time we have gone from our first steps into space, to being an interstellar species. In 2017 we discovered the first visitor from the stars and called it Oumuamua which means ‘the first messenger” in Hawaiian. Then we found another one….
Till then we had only looked at the stars with our telescopes – they were forever beyond our reach. We discovered planets orbiting other stars, but we knew we could never touch them. Then we discovered that rocks from other stars often come crashing into our solar system, and asteroids thrown out our solar system reach the stars. Soon we will land on one and bring a sample back to Earth…. and we will finally touch the soil of alien worlds.
But why does this happen? Why are asteroids so important? Can they hit Earth?
To answer these questions Matt Dawson will explain the orbits of asteroids, and how the planets throw them around like balls in a flipper game.
Asteroids are very old. To understand asteroids is to understand the formation of our solar system, the creation of Earth, and maybe even the origin of life – and of us!
