purplehalo asked: Hi! A while back NDT tweeted this picture which says "Asteroids are nature's way of asking 'How's that space program going?'" Can you tell me what this means?

NDT is simply reminding us facetiously that the underfunding of our world’s space program is a slap in the face in the wake of the last few hundred years of knowledge and our currently rapidly advancing understanding of our own solar system, along with countless others we hope to explore. However, in the not-so-distant ‘distance’ between us and the PHO’s (potentially hazardous objects) orbiting and colliding chaotically with anything in their ‘way’. Not only is this distance not-so-distant, we have so many projects aimed at the skies from the amateur to professional to mastered level, its given us fantastic views of these objects and we’ve been able to map their positions, size, mass, trajectory, and progressively, their composition.

I suggest browsing through my archive under the tag “asteroids”. Here’s a link and a post to get you started: http://sagansense.tumblr.com/post/26339566520/the-asteroid-belt