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Future of Asteroid MissionDate: Friday, October 7, 2016
Time: Doors open at 5:30pm. Event starts at 6:00pm
Location: Longway Planetarium
Fee: $6.00 adults, $4 Seniors (60+) $4 youth age 2-11, free for members. Includes admission to 7:00pm show. Get tickets now.
Rob Landis thinks it is an excellent idea to find all asteroids that may pose a potential impact threat to the Earth. He is the program executive within NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. As such, he has a wide range of programmatic and leadership roles in the near-Earth object (NEO) observations program. Come listen to Rob explain why it’s important to study asteroids and what it would take to land on an asteroid!
Near-Earth objects or ‘NEOs’ are the leftover bits of solar system jetsam and flotsam that have been nudged into orbits that allow them to come into Earth’s neighborhood. NASA recently established a new office to coordinate planetary defense-related activities across various U.S. agencies as well as international efforts to plan a response to the potential asteroid impact hazard. The creation of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) is a logical and formal maturation of NASA’s NEO Observations program which began nearly two decades ago. Since the program’s inception in 1998, NASA-funded endeavors have discovered more than 98% of all new NEOs.
As important as it is to mitigate a potential impact event, the first essential step is to find these ‘near-Earth vagabonds’ early. To that end, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office leads national and international efforts to:
• detect any potential for significant impact of the Earth by natural objects;
• appraise the range of potential effects by any possible object; and
• develop strategies to mitigate impact effects on human welfare.
In his presentation on Friday, October 7, Rob will share the current efforts to detect, track and characterize comets and asteroids that come close to our planet. And, if need be, what steps would likely be taken to deflect a potential impactor.
Bio: Rob Landis is currently assigned to NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC [in the Science Mission Directorate, Planetary Science Division] as the program executive in the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. He has had a varied career on several NASA missions including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Cassini mission at Saturn, the Mars Exploration Rovers, and the International Space Station (ISS). Main-belt asteroid ‘8136 Landis’ (provisional designation 1979 MH2) is named in his honor.
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