The Real Twitpocalypse: Asteroid Alerts Come to Twitter
Been looking for a reason to join Twitter, but haven’t been able to quite take the plunge?
Forget Shaq and William Gibson: Alerts about asteroids cruising near Earth have come to Twitter. @AsteroidWatch will let you know any time a space rock gets within a few lunar distances. Much more asteroid info will be distributed via a new NASA/JPL website. (Though if you want to know if a nuke is the best way to stop an asteroid, you’ll still need to come to Wired Science.)
“Most people have a fascination with near-Earth objects,” Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a press release. “And I have to agree with them. I have studied them for over three decades and I find them to be scientifically fascinating, and a few are potentially hazardous to Earth.”
The recent collision between a comet and Jupiter underscored the very real presence of possibly dangerous space objects in the solar system.
The Twitter feed, @lowflyingrocks, already uses NASA’s raw data to let you know after an asteroid has passed the Earth. But the site tells you about every rock within 0.2 astronomical units — that’s more than 18 million miles — so you get a ton of updates. @AsteroidWatch will be choosier about the near-earth objects it tells you about. Only rocks that come within a scant 750,000 miles or so of Earth will earn a Tweet.
With previous Twitter accounts, NASA employees have created voices for the various robots and machines that the agency operates. Some, like @MarsPhoenix, were cute and cuddly. Perhaps the proper voice for the near earth object warning system will be slightly more urgent and prone to profanity.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/the-real-twitpocalypse-asteroid-alerts-come-to-twitter/
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