If you wanted dangerous, you got it.

One week ago today, in response to heavy criticism for killing the Constellation program begun under his predecessor, President Obama presented his revised vision for NASA: To build a new heavy lift spacecraft that will go beyond low Earth orbit and land on an asteroid by around 2025. This goal is far more ambitious than going back to the moon. Space experts say such a voyage could take several months longer than a journey to the moon and entail far greater dangers. “It is really the hardest thing we can do,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said [AP].

NASA doesn’t know which of the nearby asteroids it might pick for a visit, but the main candidates are around 5 million miles from Earth. The moon, by contrast, is a little less than a quarter-million miles away. The asteroids are about a quarter-mile across; the moon is more than 2,000 miles in diameter. And a trip to an asteroid could take 200 days, as opposed to the Apollo 11 lunar round-trip, which required little more than a week. That means NASA may have to devise new radiation shields and life-support systems for the asteroid-bound astronauts.

Once you get there, it’s no picnic either. You can’t actually land on an asteroid because it has so little gravity. Astronauts would have to somehow tether themselves to the rock to keep from floating away. (DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait cheered this bit of science fact in the 1998 disaster movie Deep Impact, in which the heroes encounter this problem while visiting a comet.)

Despite the challenge, there are several great reasons to go. The chemical composition of asteroids can give scientists clues about era of the planets’ formation, roughly four and a half billion years ago. And on a practical level, an asteroid mission would be a Mars training ground, given the distance and alien locale. “If humans can’t make it to near-Earth objects, they can’t make it to Mars,” said MIT astronautics professor Ed Crawley [AP].

And then there’s the heroic Hollywood angle: If we can land on an asteroid, we might also be able to blow one up, or nudge one into a new trajectory. NASA’s Near Earth Object Program has identified more than 1,000 “potentially hazardous asteroids.” … Sometimes they come really close — in March 2009 an asteroid passed by Earth at a distance of just about 49,000 miles [ABC News]. Our planet has taken enormous hits from asteroids throughout its geological history, including the 6-mile-wide asteroid that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs.

But if humans master the art of asteroid-handling, saving the planet from death from the skies might jump from fodder for terrible movies to reality. That “would demonstrate once and for all that we’re smarter than the dinosaurs and could therefore avoid what they didn’t”, White House science adviser John Holdren said [New Scientist].

So there it is, your ultimate response to people who whine that we shouldn’t spend money on space exploration: We must prove, once and for all, that we’re tougher than T. rex.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Science and the Fiction, in which the Bad Astronomer tackles the good and bad of sci-fi science.
DISCOVER: What To Do Before the Asteroid Strikes
80beats: Obama’s Space Speech: We’ll Go To Mars in this Lifetime
80beats: European Spacecraft Buzzes Past an Asteroid, Takes Pictures
Bad Astronomy: Obama lays out bold and visionary revised space policy

Image: NASA

Joe Romm is now coming to our Harvard Kennedy School event. And Joy Moore of Seed/ScienceBlogs will be there to represent one key powerhouse of the science blogosphere. It's all on the website, which has been newly updated. And so has the poster. Check it all out.

In 2007, James Randi took the stage at TED and apparently had a pretty good time (I still hear stories about it). The folks at TED just put the video up, and it’s a hoot.

I’ll note that Randi was 79 when this was filmed. Could you do this well now? There’s a reason his middle name is "Amazing".

Pity the poor scientists–no matter how hard they try to convince the public that science is one of the few things you can trust in this crazy, mixed-up world, public faith in science is still tough to come by.

A new study (pdf) conducted at the University of Maryland examined people’s belief in extrasensory perception (ESP), the supposed paranormal phenomenon of mind-reading. The study not only found that people tend to disregard the views of the scientific community when it comes to paranormal activity, it also showed that they’re inclined to disagree with the scientists.

For the study, the researchers had 160 college students watch a video of a person performing brilliantly on a card-guessing exercise. What the students didn’t know is that the player was discreetly being fed all the answers. To the viewers, it appeared that she was either extremely lucky or had some sort of sixth sense, writes online magazine Miller McCune.

After watching the video, the students were asked a series of questions, including if they believed in ESP and if they thought that the woman in the video had extrasensory powers.

Miller McCune writes:

The participants were broken up into four groups. Those in Condition One were informed that 25 percent of the public believes in ESP, but the scientific community rejects the concept. Those in Condition Two were told that more than 90 percent of the public believes in ESP, but the scientific community considers it bogus.

Those in Condition Three were told that 25 percent of the public believes in ESP, and the scientific community is becoming more open to the idea. Those in Condition Four were informed that more than 90 percent of the public believes in ESP, and the scientific community is beginning to warm to the possibility it is real.

The scientists found that individuals were more likely to report belief in ESP when they were told that a greater percentage of the public believed in it. But, the researchers wrote, “We found no effects indicating that science rejecting a claim led individuals to be less likely to believe the claim.” In fact, those students who were told that scientists dismiss ESP were more likely to declare that the phenomenon is real.

The researchers say there are several possible explanations for this odd result. It might be, they say, that people see paranormal activity as a matter of belief and not evidence. Or it could be that when it comes to psychic coolness, people placed more faith in their peers’ opinions than in those of scientists. But there’s a final, more ominous interpretation, say the researchers: “The findings may result from a decreasing trust in the institution of science.”

Miller McCune writes that the news is particularly worrisome for climatologists–whose warnings about global warming’s dire effects are increasingly being pooh-poohed by a cynical public.

Related Content:
The Intersection: Are Americans Becoming More Distrustful of Science?
Discoblog: UFO Sightings: The Shapes They Are A-Changing
Discoblog: How To Chat With an Alien: The Official Guide
80beats: Damage to One Brain Region Can Boost “Transcendent” Feelings
80beats: Pick a Number. Now, a Brain Scan Will Reveal What It Is.

Image: iStockphoto