On Thursday 4^th March 2010 a group of Year11 students made their way to W5 to spend the morning thinking about the lesser known topic of Near -Earth Objects (NEOs)

 

What’s that you might ask?  Well, as a number of Lagan students will now be able to tell you; it is an area of Physics concerned with studying the objects that move through space (comets and asteroids) and could potentially strike the Earth. 

 

By taking part in a number of fun activities students learnt that NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) invest a lot of time and money monitoring these objects – and for important reasons.  These objects vary in size: from small meteorites which hit the Earth regularly (such as the one reported by our local news in Jan 2010); to very large objects which have the potential to wipe out our civilisation (this was illustrated to us by the KT event which scientists believe to have wiped out the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago). 

 

So how do our governments plan to protect us from this latter treat?  Well, Lagan students are now aware of a number of potential ways to deflect an oncoming object and in keeping with this theme the session went on to introduce everyone to some basic rocket building techniques.  Given the resulting test demonstrations, let’s hope Ben’s team will be around to help us with rocket building in 2036 when a large object called Apophis could be on a direct collision course with Earth!

 

Keep up the good work NASA and ESA.  For more information go to:  http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Physics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.