As McEnery worked through her inbox, an automatically generated report arrived from NASA’s Robotic Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) team based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. On scanning the document, she discovered that Fermi was just one week away from an unusually close encounter with Cosmos 1805, a defunct spy satellite dating back to the Cold War.

The two objects, speeding around Earth at thousands of miles an hour in nearly perpendicular orbits, were expected to miss each other by a mere 700 feet.

“My immediate reaction was, ‘Whoa, this is different from anything we’ve seen before!'” McEnery recalled.

via NASA – The Day NASA’s Fermi Dodged a 1.5-ton Bullet.

Fermilab was designed by Robert Wilson, a physicist who made an impassioned plea for basic research in front of a Congressional committee (Image: Wikipedia Commons)

It’s been said many times. Curiosity-driven research with no immediate application or goal is what has primarily led to science’s greatest discoveries as well as our high standard of living. It is what has led to the ascendancy of American science during the twentieth century. If you want great discoveries to happen, the recipe is clear; get the best scientists together and leave them alone.

And yet politicians just don’t get it. In the latest incarnation of this ignorance, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas wants to tell the NSF how to fund research. And here’s a trivial and forgettable fact: Smith heads the House Committee on Science and Technology. It’s also worth noting that Smith had sponsored the egregious SOPA. Science Magazine has now reported on his lack of understanding of the history of science and technology:

“Science Insider has obtained a copy of the legislation, labeled “Discussion Draft” and dated 18 April, which has begun to circulate among members of Congress and science lobbyists. In effect, the proposed bill would force NSF to adopt three criteria in judging every grant. Specifically, the draft would require the NSF director to post on NSF’s website, prior to any award, a declaration that certifies the research is:

via The head of the House Committee on Science does not understand how science works | The Curious Wavefunction, Read Full Story, Scientific American Blog Network.

This image shows the moon, Earth’s only natural satellite, at center with the limb of Earth near the bottom transitioning into the orange-colored troposphere, the lowest and most dense portion of Earth’s atmosphere. The troposphere ends abruptly at the tropopause, which appears in the image as the sharp boundary between the orange- and blue-colored atmosphere. The silvery-blue noctilucent clouds extend far above Earth’s troposphere. Image credit: NASA

Earth’s atmosphere is critically important to all of us. In addition to providing us with air to breathe, it protects us from temperature extremes, harmful space radiation, and vast numbers of incoming meteoroids. The atmosphere is a very complex system that we are only beginning to understand. Gaining a better understanding of the atmosphere, how it protects us, and how we can protect it is in all of our interests.

In order to understand Earth’s atmosphere and how it works, it is essential to study atmospheres under a wide range of conditions beyond Earth. Examining atmospheres on other planets allows this. For example, by studying the atmosphere of Venus, we learned about the role of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and saw how it drives the temperature on Venus as high as 860 degrees Fahrenheit (460 degrees Celsius).

via NASA – Why LADEE Matters.