NASA Announces Asteroid Grand Challenge

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NASA Announces Asteroid Grand Challenge

Post by bystander » Wed Jun 19, 2013 12:15 am

NASA Announces Asteroid Grand Challenge
NASA Headquarters | 2013 Jun 18

NASA announced Tuesday a Grand Challenge focused on finding all asteroid threats to human populations and knowing what to do about them.

The challenge, which was announced at an asteroid initiative industry and partner day at NASA Headquarters in Washington, is a large-scale effort that will use multi-disciplinary collaborations and a variety of partnerships with other government agencies, international partners, industry, academia, and citizen scientists. It complements NASA's recently announced mission to redirect an asteroid and send humans to study it.

"NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth's orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth," said NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver. "This Grand Challenge is focused on detecting and characterizing asteroids and learning how to deal with potential threats. We will also harness public engagement, open innovation and citizen science to help solve this global problem."

Grand Challenges are ambitious goals on a national or global scale that capture the imagination and demand advances in innovation and breakthroughs in science and technology. They are an important element of President Obama's Strategy for American Innovation.

"I applaud NASA for issuing this Grand Challenge because finding asteroid threats, and having a plan for dealing with them, needs to be an all-hands-on-deck effort," said Tom Kalil, deputy director for technology and innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "The efforts of private-sector partners and our citizen scientists will augment the work NASA already is doing to improve near-Earth object detection capabilities."

NASA also released a request for information (RFI) that invites industry and potential partners to offer ideas on accomplishing NASA's goal to locate, redirect, and explore an asteroid, as well as find and plan for asteroid threats. The RFI is open for 30 days, and responses will be used to help develop public engagement opportunities and a September industry workshop.

NASA Asks for Help Finding Asteroids and Capturing One
ScienceInsider | Richard A. Kerr | 2013 Jun 18

Today at their headquarters here, NASA officials launched a two-pronged campaign that is mostly a call for help but is also an attempt to raise the profile of NASA's ambitious plan to snag a passing asteroid that astronauts could inspect close to home.

One component is a Grand Challenge—an element of President Barack Obama's Strategy for American Innovation—to "find all [asteroid] threats to human populations and know what to do about them," according to Jason Kessler of NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist. Because any asteroid headed toward Earth bigger than 40 meters or so in size could wipe out a city, the challenge is a tall order, said Harold Reitsema at the headquarters meeting. He is lead designer of the privately funded B612 effort to search for asteroids using a satellite. "I would like to emphasize how grand your Grand Challenge is," he said, pointing out that astronomers are finding only 1000 asteroids a year when they need to be finding 100,000 a year to develop a robust defense system.

Kessler acknowledged the problem but contended that "we do have the ability to prove that we are smarter than the dinosaurs," which were wiped out by a 10-kilometer asteroid. The president's fiscal year 2014 budget request includes $20 million to beef up NASA's existing search for "near-Earth objects," but the Grand Challenge would go further, Kessler said. There would be monetary prizes to encourage search innovations, crowdsourcing to speed up the identification of new objects, citizen science programs to draw in more amateur astronomers to the search, and a request for new ideas for how to improve and accelerate what NASA is already doing. The agency's effort to tap outside wisdom appeared to start paying off during the teleconference itself, which included questions and comments from a self-identified "mad scientist," a "geek," and a retired aerospace engineer.

The Grand Challenge to accelerate the discovery of threatening asteroids dovetails with NASA's proposed Asteroid Retrieval Mission, announced in early April. Before sending a robotic spacecraft to capture a 7- to 10-meter-diameter, 500-tonne asteroid and haul it into a high orbit around the moon where astronauts could study it, NASA will have to find a very special asteroid. It would have to be the right size and shape and be in the right orbit around the sun, among many constraints. Many planetary scientists have voiced concerns that no one could find and characterize enough candidates in time to meet NASA's launch schedule for the robotic spacecraft and the crewed vehicle that would carry astronauts out to the corralled asteroid.

NASA had two responses to those concerns. In the second prong of its campaign, the agency is issuing a request for information to any and all organizations—private and public—and any individuals—academic or otherwise—anywhere in the world for ideas about how to accomplish the retrieval mission. Officials also clarified that a crewed mission to an asteroid need not launch in 2021, as has appeared on NASA timelines. That could be put off as late as 2025 and still meet President Obama's goal of sending astronauts to an asteroid by then.

The agency also plans to collect information at NASA advisory group meetings, public gatherings, preliminary reviews, and from targeted requests for information. NASA will feed what it learns into a mission concept review by around the first of the year, officials said.

Statement from Ed Lu Re: Asteroid Grand Challenge
B612 Foundation | 2013 Jun 18

This morning, The White House and NASA announced an ASTEROID GRAND CHALLENGE, “focused on finding all asteroid threats to human populations and knowing what to do with them.” This directly mirrors the mission of the non-profit private B612 Foundation and our Sentinel Mission, and we strongly applaud NASA and the Obama Administration for their leadership in raising the visibility of this critical issue and for establishing detection of asteroids as a national priority. The Administration has called for a team “of the best and brightest” working on this together and we look forward to increased collaboration and partnership.

There are one million asteroids with the potential to impact Earth with energy large enough to obliterate any major city. We believe that the goal must be to find these one million asteroids - anything less, in our opinion, would not meet the intent of this Grand Challenge.
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk.
— Garrison Keillor

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Re: NASA Announces Asteroid Grand Challenge

Post by neufer » Fri Jun 06, 2014 12:54 pm

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