Andy is a NPR Celebrity

As you may know, there is an asteroid that may hit Mars at the end of January. This was all over the news the past few weeks. Over Christmas, Andy worked his magic with the archive data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and found the asteroid in the archive. Long story short (he can elaborate further for all those wanting to know), his findings increased the probability of the asteroid hitting Mars from 1 in 75 to 1 in 25!

Don Yeomans, the director of the Near Earth Object Program for NASA, was a guest on NPR's Science Friday yesterday. During the interview, Yeomans explained the change in probability and mentioned Andy and his research.

But, celebrity is fleeting. NASA's press release (which mentioned Andy by name) was picked up by the Associated Press. The AP butchered the story, and demoted Andy to a anonymous PhD student.

We are very proud of Andy. Its exciting to see his research be noticed by scientists and the public alike. He works hard, in this case working much of Christmas Day, and its exciting for all of us when the hard work pays off.

If you would like to listen to the NPR interview, you can do so at the Science Friday site:

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200712281

And here's the NASA press release, which Andy provided info for:

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news153.html

Keep your eye out for the AP story, its hit most major news outlets. Headline news ran a blurb about it, and its been on CNN's crawl. Here's a link to the wire story:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gh4pCIVMODpYJ8IeyIaDkqK6hWIQD8TQOISO2