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In Our Time
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PROGRAMME INFO |
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The big ideas which form the intellectual agenda of our age are illuminated by some of the best minds. Melvyn Bragg and three guests investigate the history of ideas and debate their application in modern life. |
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PRESENTER |
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BIOGRAPHY
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| "I'm fascinated by the fact that we live in a time when so many people are doing fantastic work, and thinking in areas which it's not remotely possible for me to keep up with & and these people are prepared to talk about it. They're prepared to come on In Our Time and other programmes on Radio 4 and try and talk to the rest of us ..." |
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ASTEROIDS
Read audience reactions to this edition.
Go to our research page to find out more about this subject.
Asteroids used to be regarded as the 'vermin of the solar system', irritating rubble that got in the way of astronomers trying to study more interesting phenomena. It was difficult or even impossible for an observer of asteroids to book time using the world's best telescopes, because they were regarded as unspectacular objects that could tell us little about the origins of the universe.
However, that has all changed. It is now thought that asteroids are the unused building blocks of planets, 'pristine material' that has remained chemically unchanged since the creation of the solar system; a snapshot of matter at the beginning of time. At the moment the Japanese probe Hayabusa is 180 million miles away, pinned to the back of the asteroid Itokawa, attempting to gain our first samples of the chemical composition of an asteroid.
Why did asteroids fail to form planets? How do they differ from their celestial cousins, the comets? And are either of them likely to create another impact on planet Earth?
Contributors
Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University
Carolin Crawford, Royal Society Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge
John Zarnecki, Professor of Space Science at the Open University
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