Pop culture frames NASA as the agency to save us from anything but that's not entirely realistic
, is often a reason why people get interested in space exploration and grow up to work with NASA in the first place.
Finding and responding to potential threats to the planet is very much part of NASA’s mission, though the movies might give an outsized expectation of exactly what capabilities Houston would have in a“I'd say they definitely exaggerate NASA’s role,” Dreier said ofand other space disaster movies. “NASA doesn’t have a lot of responsibilities formally within the national defense structure or the U.S. government on a whole. It's not like NASA’s a cabinet-level position.
“I think expectation-setting is something to be aware of,” Dreier said, acknowledging that some movies give the false impression that NASA can “just throw together aian-type of spacecraft that you can just hammer together in a couple of months and then access any part of the solar system you need.” While a lunar assault is thankfully beyond the pale, NASA is hard at work tracking much smaller heavenly bodies—asteroids that could do serious damage to the planet even if they’re a fraction of the moon’s size. Organizations like the Center For Near-Earth Object Studies have found a little less than half of an estimated 60,000 asteroids that could threaten Earth one way or another.
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