When: October 31st, 2019 @ 3:45PM Where: PAA A102

This week’s colloquium speaker is our own Siegfried Eggl. 

Throwing DARTs at Asteroids

For the first time in the history of our planet its inhabitants have the means to avert catastrophic impacts of near-Earth asteroids. The two-pronged approach currently pursued by national agencies and their international partners is to take stock of potentially hazardous objects on the one hand, and to test technologies that alter the trajectories of large impactors on the other hand.  In this seminar I will discuss current and future capabilities of finding and deflecting near-Earth asteroids. In particular, I will focus on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) currently under construction at Cerro Pachón, Chile, as well as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a NASA asteroid deflection demonstration mission to be launched in 2021.