[meteorite-list] NASA Announces Asteroid Grand Challenge

[Ron Baalke]

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 

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