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| 951 Gaspra (NASA enhanced-color photo) |
In the bad old days, salvation was on sale via Roman
Catholic Church indulgences.
Nowadays salvation is still being auctioned off, but this time around in a very scientific manner. Robert Z. Perlman from Space.com tells us that astronauts Rusty Schweickart ("Apollo 9 spacewalker") and Ed Lu ("International Space Station flight
engineer") will be selling their "flown-in-space mission patches, flags, medals and pins" to the highest eBay bidders. By doing so, they hope to raise funds to "support the launch of the private Sentinel space telescope."
This telescope has been designed to "discover, map, and track asteroids with orbits that approach Earth…" In other
words, it could find asteroids that might otherwise hasten many - if not all - humans to their just (or hopefully merciful) desserts...
Schweickart and Lu are determined to "get" those space rocks before they smash us to smithereens. As Lu (humbly?) put it:
We want to literally save the world. He then explained: Both
Rusty and I were privileged to see
the Earth as few others have, and that
experience has convinced us that… there is no more important mission than protecting our home planet.
Resources
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/astronauts-auction-own-artifacts-save-world-asteroids-6C10547244#science/astronauts-auction-own-artifacts-help-save-earth-asteroids-6C10547244
Copyright July 6, 2013 by Linda Van Slyke All Rights Reserved
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