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I'd just like to step in and make a few corrections and clarifications:

"Obviously a project named after the inventors."
Judge for yourselves, The original AJC posting had a picture of us, as did the actual article. The article also included a nice illustration of the MADMEN.

"But if you ask me, the whole thing sounds like something cooked up by Hubert J. Farnsworth."
Since I designed the MADMEN nodes, does that mean I know officially qualify as a mad scientist?

"NASA really has beaten Congress in the stupid name department."
NASA did not come up with the acronym, nor did they have anything at all to do with this project. The acronym was concocted by AC (the guy on the left in the pic). I'm working on the design for the landers, but managed to write an entire paper on the system without using the acronym. We (SpaceWorks Engineering, Inc.) are not partners with NIAC. They are a group which sponsors far out research like this. We are a completely independant company from them or NASA.

NASA has done some work in asteroid detection, and has similar groups which have done some work on asteroid deflection (with giant lasers I believe) but no dedicated organization for this sort of stuff.

"In short they are paying 75k for a group of people to sit around a brainstorm ideas. Neat concept, call me when we are actually past the idea part of it."
Hopefully we'll win a NIAC phase II for this and actually build something and get more in depth with the concept.

"If some of them breaks, there's a lot more to carry on."
That's pretty much the whole point of the swarm.

"How much will these things weigh? With a nuke generator, and drilling and launching equipment to handle a pound of rock at a time over and over, say 1000 pounds max."
More like 1300 kg, but the in space transfer stage weight a lot more than that

"Asteroids ROTATE, in wildly different ways and have a miniscule amount of local gravity. "
The MADMEN would definitely have to be located around the asteroid and would obviously only fire when on one side.

And landing on an asteroid is not really that hard, its already been done by a spacecraft not even intended to land on one.

Notice it includes ?rated=5 - that means all /. readers who use that URL will give it a rating of 5 out of 6.

Way to mess up their stats :)

It also links directly to the article, which will instantly reload you to the frameset. A better URL is http://www.starstuff.org/default.asp?cover=/articl es/1087.asp, which won't make you vote for anything and which won't cause the entire thing to refresh into a frameset the instant it loads.

Kinda reminds me of my first astronomy class. I hadn't even made it to my freshman year of high school and I had 4 credits of Astronomy from the local community college.

Many people have given good advice above. I'll mainly just second their comments. The order I'd proceed in is.

First item, a good beginners star atlas.

Second item, warm clothing.

Third item, many nights in the country just learning the stars and constelations.

After that go and get a good pair of binoculars or a good telescope.

Last, but not least. As your doughter is so young, you will need to be there as a source of infromation. You'll need to learn alot to help guide her in the early years.

Now for some Links. The first two have good beginners information. Some of the links below may be dead. I just quick cut and pasted them from the astronomy section of my Interesting Places page.

• Astronomy Mag. (www.astronomy.com/home.asp).
• Sky & Telescope Mag. (www.skypub.com).
• Minnesota Astronomical Society (MAS) (www.mnastro.org).
• The Telescope Shoppe (www.telescopeshop.com), 3402 Federal Dr., Eagan, MN, 651-688-7335. Yes this is a local Twin Cities telescope shop. They have a map on their site showing where they are. They are tucked in the lower level along the side of the strip mall they are in. The store is small and easy to miss. If your at the corner of Yankee Doodle RD and Federal Dr., park in the lot to the south east. They are a short stones throw from the intersection.
• Telescope making links
• • Many good links on making AltAz mounts (zebu.uoregon.edu/~mbartels/altaz/altaz.html).
  • ATM's resource List (www.freenet.tlh.fl.us/~blombard).
• Astronomy-Mall.com (www.astronomy-mall.com/Astronomy-Mall).
• Stellafane (www.stellafane.com).
• Terrestrial Planet Finder (tpf.jpl.nasa.gov).
• Many Images of the moon (www.seds.org/nineplanets/nineplanets/pxmoon.html) .
• Solar Views (www.solarviews.com).
• Planetary Image Atlas (www-pdsimage.JPL.NASA.GOV/PDS/public/Atlas).
• Hubble Space Telescope Archive (oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pictures.html).
• Hummble Site (hubble.stsci.edu).
• StarStuff (www.starstuff.org).
• SpaceRef (www.spaceref.com), Your space refference.
• Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive (antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html).
• SkyView (skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov) virtual observatory.
• 2MASS (www.ipac.caltech.edu/2mass/) and (pegasus.astro.umass.edu/GradProg/2mass.html) Two Micron All Sky Survey.
• Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment (LASCO) (http://lasco-www.nrl.navy.mil/lasco.html).
• AAVSO Network to Search for Optical Counterparts of Gamma-Ray Bursts (www.aavso.org/grb.stm).
• High Altitude Observatory (www.hao.ucar.edu).
• Asteroid Comet Impact Hazards (impact.arc.nasa.gov).
• • Unusual Minor Planets (cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/Unusual.html).
  • Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/PHACloseApp.html).& nbsp; Of particular interest to me are LB16 and AN10 which will pass at a distance closer than the moon's orbit. LB16 currently only has one opposition charted so it's predicted orbit will likely change as new data comes in. It's expected to swing by in 2004. In 2027 AN10 will visit earth. It's orbit is calculated with three oppositions meaning it't much more likely to really showup ontime and in place. With further data LB16 could either get closer or farther away. When AN10's orbit was first predicted (only one opposition at the time) it's error envelope included earth. With further data it was found to just pass within the moon's orbit and miss the earth.
  • Forthcoming Close Approaches To The Earth (cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/CloseApp.html).&nbs p; This is the document to look at when you want to know who will visit next and how far away. It has all close approaches to 0.2 AU away from earth or within 20% of the distance of between the sun and earth. On Sep 19th, 2000 we will have a visiter at 0.0477 AU and on Oct 31st anotehr one will pass at 0.07386 AU. LB16 and AN10 are expected to pass at around 0.25% of the distance between the sun and earth.
• Mars Global Surveyor (mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/index.html).
• Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) (ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/mola.html). There are full data on the shape of Mars including 1 degree and .5 degree elevation data sets.
• Planetary photojournal by JPL (photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov).
• NASA's Origins Program (origins.jpl.nasa.gov).

we get with observatories. (And to some extent neutrinos.) Only one force in nature is transmitted by photons (the electromagnetic force), so there's a lot we're missing. Astronomical objects are by nature very far away and uncontrolled. Anything could be happening that you don't see. Also, there is no opportunity to see very high energy phenomena. The latest colliders can make a quark-gluon plasma. When's the last time you heard of an astronomer seeing that? These exotic particles and matter like this are short-lived, so their properties are almost impossible to infer from astronomical observations, which take many years to reach us.

Another point is that most astronomers deduce the physics by comparing observations to known physics. We see spectral lines in stars and know that they signify certain elements because we can reproduce the spectral lines of a single element here on earth and compare.

Moral: Ug like collider too. Make happy.