Video transcript of meeting
Finding Asteroids Before They Find Us – Kelly Fast, NASA/Planetary Defence Coordination Office
- Finding the asteroid (bigger than 1m in size)
- Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that are hazardous to Earth (140m in size or larger)
- NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to hazardous asteroid Bennu
- Search, Detect & Track hazardous asteroids
- International Asteroid Warning Network – worldwide effort
- Searching for NEOs
- Catalina Sky Survey – Arizona
- Pan-STARRS – Maui, Hawaii
- ATLAS – Hawaii, South Africa, Chile
- LINEAR/SST – Australia
- NEOWISE – JPL infrared space telescope
- Follow-up telescopes also used
- IAU Minor Planet Center – observations
- JPL Center for Near Earth Object Studies – high precision NEO orbits, impact predictions
- ESA Space Missions Planning Advisory Group – potential NEO deflection mission plans
- Impact of small asteroid 2022 EB5 – March 11, 2022
- U.S. Interagency Tabletop Exercise – 6 month warning time
- 30,000 NEAs found so far
- NEO Surveyor – new infrared space telescope being developed by NASA
- Characterizing asteroids using infrared and radar
- Asteroid Deflection
- Gravity tractor
- Nuclear explosion
- Kinetic Impact – DART mission tested technique on Didymous/Dimorphos system
- Change the orbital period
- Autonomous navigation needed
- Many ground-based observatories observed impact and resultant changes to Dimorphos
- LICIACube satellite imaged the whole mission
- Questions and discussion
2023 RASC Calendars – email Lauri Roche to reserve a copy