[meteorite-list] NASA Announces Asteroid Grand Challenge

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:36:49 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201306181636.r5IGanQx013135_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

June 18, 2013

Sarah Ramsey/Rachel Kraft
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1694/1100
sarah.ramsey at nasa.gov / rachel.h.kraft at nasa.gov

RELEASE: 13-188

NASA ANNOUNCES ASTEROID GRAND CHALLENGE

WASHINGTON -- 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.

To watch the archived video of Tuesday's asteroid initiative industry
and partner day, visit:

http://youtube.com/nasatelevision

For more information about NASA's asteroid initiative, including
presentations from Tuesday's event and a link to the new RFI, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/asteroidinitiative

-end-
Received on Tue 18 Jun 2013 12:36:49 PM PDT