Asteroid Day Special Event

To celebrate 'Astreoid Day', the SETI Institute is holding a special event where two SETI asteroid scientists will give short presentations on the latest thinking on how to handle the Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) problem and the goals of NASA's Asteroid Return Mission (ARM). Michael Busch will give a talk on the properties of target NEAs and Peter Jenniskens will give a talk on a new concept (SHEPHERD) for the Asteroid Return mission.

Characterizing Target Asteroids for ARM with Michael Busch
ARM would go to a near-Earth asteroid, pick up a large block or boulder, and return it to Earth-Moon space. Based on ground-based and spacecraft observations, the ARM team has identified four candidate asteroids: 2008 EV5, Bennu, Itokawa, and 1999 JU3. I'll review what we currently know about these objects and how we've learned it.

The SHEPHERD Asteroid Return Mission with Peter Jenniskens
The current ARM is focussed on collecting a boulder from a large asteroid, in part because small free-floating asteroids are hard to characterize in advance well enough to give engineers certainty that they can handle the rock. Future asteroid utilization missions will face the same issue. Now, Peter Jenniskens, working with Bruce Damer, Stuart Pilorz, Julian Nott, and other colleagues, has proposed a way to get around that difficulty, and in the process they created a new vision for future space exploration.