News & Events

Look to the Skies -- It's International Asteroid Day

Active Asteroids:  Dozens of worldlets in asteroid-like orbits spout comet-like tails, challenging our understanding of small bodies in the solar system.

The Blast that Shook the World:  Ten years ago, as the sun rose over Chelyabinsk, Russia, the sky exploded. Since the Chelyabinsk impact, two spacecraft have not only approached small asteroids but also collected samples from them; one, Hayabusa2, already dropped off its samples back at Earth, and the other, OSIRIS-REx, will do so later this year. To that end, in November 2021 NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which slammed a half-ton impactor into the 170meter-wide asteroid Dimorphos - a moon of the larger asteroid Didymos.  Chelyabinsk was a wake-up alarm for Earth —a loud one.

How Did We Get the Asteroid Belt? - The asteroid belt divides the solar system in two, with rocky planets near the Sun and giants relegated to the outskirts. Because Mars sits so close to the asteroid belt, the same process that swept away the planet's initial reservoir of building material would also have removed part of the asteroid belt. He points out that the model not only covers many features of the asteroid belt and solves the small Mars problem, it also answers several other questions about the solar system, such as why it lacks the super-Earths abundant around other stars

On June 12, 1942, a young Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, receives a diary for her 13th birthday. A month later, she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis. For two years, her family and other families will be hid, fed and cared for by Gentile friends.  Her words and thoughts form the basis of an on-the-ground cultural interpreter of a horrific historical event, a small red-and-white checked remembrance of war and bigotry, and of the courage of families who sought a way out of the Nazi regime.  

Her name was Anne Frank.   She received her diary 93 years ago.  

In her first entry, Anne wrote to her diary as if it was a personal friend; “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”  But she was also growing in maturity, and realizing that her parents' birthday present was a way to answer the call of the Dutch government-in-exile: tell us your stories.  For two years, the girl wrote in the diary, describing her most intimate thoughts and feelings, as well as documenting what it was like to live under German occupation and in hiding.  The adults around her and in far flung places begged their children to remember these times, and Anne wrote as a diarist with a mission: to preserve her thoughts and ideas as well as the actions of those around her.  Her hope was that she would survive to contribute the diary to a larger purpose.   Her horror is that she did not survive, but the diary did.   

Interpretations of the diary in the years after Otto Frank provided it as an example of Holocaust diarist writing abound.  Several plays completely dolled up his daughter into the perfect icongraphic dead Jewish girl whose death happens off-stage; at least one novel sexed her up, by speculating on her secret romance with a boy from another family.   Otto himself stands accused of tearing out pages that described unhappy marital relations with his wife.  It seems that Anne's writing changed perspective with the editors who were studying her life.  The runaway success of Anne Frank’s diary depended on playing down her Jewish identity: At least two direct references to Hanukkah were edited out of the diary when it was originally published.  As Dara Horn described it in her book People Love Dead Jews, her first entry in the original diary, for instance, begins with a long description of her birthday gifts (the blank diary being one of them), an entirely unself-conscious record by a 13-year-old girl.  Anne rewrote the diary; she edited and prepared it for revisions, a talented writer far from the public perception of a mindless girl documenting her life.   Horn writes:  "The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary—“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”—is often called “inspiring,” by which we mean that it flatters us. It makes us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. "

Over time various cultures have interpreted the text in different ways.  What the reception of Frank's text in Cambodia and North Korea suggests is that the way in which an account travels primarily indicates the text's usefulness in the contexts in which it's received.  Much has been written about teaching and learning about the Holocaust in social studies classrooms.  The redemptive power of Anne's story is seen as neglible to school children exposed to her diary in 8th grade or thereabouts; while the work is relatable to them, containing both arguments with parents and melodramatic declarations they may be akin to understand, it also presents a somewhat sanitized version of "the Holocaust."   They do not get to see Anne dying slowly in Bergen-Belsen, rather seeing only the girl who took off her shoes to avoid heel clatter and whose story ends at the window rather than the grave.

The diary remains a substantial artefact from the German occupation, its talented author a quintessential unknown in a Holocaust of her Jewish heritage, a voice cut short but living on in our collective memory.   And there, as they say, may her memory be a blessing.