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On Tuesday, February 26, 2008, The Planetary Society, based in Pasadena, California, U.S.A., announced the winners of its $50,000 Apophis Mission Design Competition.
An American team received top honors. Atlanta, Georgia-based SpaceWorks Engineering, Inc. and Poway, California-based SpaceDev Inc. came away with the US$25,000 first place prize money for its asteroid mission called “Foresight.”
The Foresight mission uses an orbiter with two sensing instruments onboard, along with a radio tracking beacon.
The cost of US$137.2 million for the mission would involve building the spacecraft, launching it from a Minotaur IV solid fuel rocket (by Orbital Sciences Corporation), along with operations to rendezvous, observe, and track the asteroid with a multi-spectral imager and a laser ranger.
Director of Projects for The Planetary Society Bruce Betts, stated of the competition, “We are very happy that this competition inspired innovative designs to solve an important problem that could affect life on Earth—as the dinosaurs learned the hard way. We hope the winning entries will catalyze the world’s space agencies to move ahead with designs and missions to protect Earth from potentially dangerous asteroids and comets.” [The Planetary Society: “Planetary Society Names Winners of $50,000 Asteroid Tagging Competition”]
In fact, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Union’s European Space Agency (ESA) co-sponsored the competition and agreed to review the winning submittals for consideration of future missions to asteroids.
Other co-sponsors for the competition included the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA).
The competition was named Apophis because the near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis, discovered in 2004, will come very close to the Earth in the year 2029 and, possibly even closer in 2036. The asteroid is approximately 885 feet (270 meters) in diameter.
The competition was held in the year 2008 because one hundred years ago, in June 1908, an asteroid or comet exploded above the Siberian forest, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, destroying about 775 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) of Soviet land. It was called the Tunguska Event.
Second place, for US$10,000, was awarded to a European team consisting of Deimos Space S.L. of Madrid, Spain, along with EADS Astrium, Friedrichshafen, Germany; University of Stuttgart, Germany; and Universitá di Pisa, Italy.
The third place finisher, for US$5,000, was EADS Astrium Ltd, United Kingdom, along with EADS Astrium SAS, France; IASF-Roma, INAF, Rome, Italy; Open University, UK; Rheinisches Institut für Umweltforschung, Germany; Royal Observatory of Belgium; and Telespazio, Italy.
The additional knowledge that scientists would learn from such a tagging-and-tracking mission would allow the Earth sufficient time to launch a mission to [somehow] prevent an asteroid from hitting Earth.
The Planetary Society is a public, non-governmental planetary and space exploration organization that was founded by Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman in 1980.
For additional information on the Apophis Mission Design Competition, please go to the Planetary Society’s website titled “Announcing the Winners” at: http://planetary.org/programs/projects/apophis_competition/.
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