Every week, Pars3c profiles an interesting person with connections in the space field. This time it’s Tom Taylor (@tomtaylor), who created the Twitter feed @lowflyingrocks. The feed automatically broadcasts all asteroids that pass within 0.2 astronomical units of Earth — that is to say, 30 million kilometres (18.6 million miles).

As Taylor tells Pars3c, he didn’t create the feed out of a sense of doom and gloom. That said, I urge you to read the very last line of this interview for a bit of perspective on that.

1) From reading your list of Internet-based data projects, which range from creating newspapers to microprinters to Low Flying Rocks, it seems that you’re an electronic tinkerer. How did you get started on this path?

I’ve always been interested more in making things than computing, per se. It just happens that computing is often the easiest way to make things that touch a lot of people. I’m not always particularly great at writing or speaking, but making quick and nimble things is a good way to express thoughts and intentions. Thinking by doing, if you like.

I originally trained as an engineer, and I still think of myself as one, but there’s a world of interesting things to be made outside of the traditional fields, and I’m determined to explore that.

2) What inspired you to create Low Flying Rocks?

A couple of projects made me think. Matt Webb’s Presence Machine is a daily nudge to look around oneself. And Paul Mison’s Above London is a Twitter account mentioning passes of the ISS over London (where I live).

Both these things give you a little nudge to look up, and Twitter feels like the perfect medium for that. Gentle and discrete.

3) Was it very difficult to re-appropriate the NASA Near-Earth Objects Database for your purpose?

It wasn’t too hard. I wrote a simple script in Ruby, which fetches the page every night, extracting the useful information and scheduling the next day’s tweets. The HTML on the NEO site is a bit of a mess, but I’ve seen worse!

I wanted to keep the volume of tweets to a few times a week, so it’s always a surprise when a message appears. 0.2AU seemed like a good cut off point – a wider range would be a bit too verbose.

4) Low Flying Rocks now has more than 3,000 followers. Has anyone used or responded to the data in a way that surprised you?

It’s always interesting doing a search for people talking about the bot. A lot of people just retweet the bot, especially if it’s the first message they’ve seen. A fair few people describe it as adding to their paranoia or making it harder for them to sleep!

For me, it’s the opposite – there’s comfort in being reminded that the clockwork of the universe is just ticking along.

5) Any plans to extend the project?

It’s been quietly adding followers over two years now, and mentioned nearly 1000 NEOs. (First tweet here: http://twitter.com/lowflyingrocks/status/798509459)

I haven’t got any other plans for it. I’m quite satisfied that it’s sitting there, ticking along. Every now and again I post a link to an interesting article related to asteroids, but for the most part it’s in the world, people are following it, and I’m happy with that.

In October 2008, 2008 TC3 was spotted just a few hours before impact. It exploded above Sudan in the early hours of October 7, having only just been added to the JPL NEO database. It was the first time that an asteroid has been spotted and tracked before impact.

Even though the distance was somewhat off (it actually ended up exploding 20 miles up), this tweet was incredibly satisfying: ”2008 TC3 just passed the Earth at 13km/s, approximately five thousand, nine hundred and eighty km away.”

I haven’t written any code to deal with a collision situation . . . yet.

High 5