The NASA Asteroid Grand Challenge

NASA has embarked on the Asteroid Grand Challenge, a program to “find all asteroid threats to human populations and know what to do about them”.  The Asteroid Grand Challenge involves detecting all near earth objects (NEOs) larger than 100 metres, characterise them and determine a way to mitigate them.  But while dedicated search programs do a great job of finding these objects, follow up observations are required to characterise them and more precisely define their orbits.  This pastime is well suited to dedicated amateur astronomers.

There are hundreds of NEOs that need observation.  While there is excellent coverage in the northern hemisphere, coverage from the southern hemisphere is less, and from South Africa is non-existent!  A gap exists in these time dependent observations, where South Africa enjoys a unique position on the globe, and ASSA amateurs are well positioned to make a significant contribution to this program.

Plot of locations submitting observations of asteroids. Notice the lack of coverage from Africa!

As a result ASSA has embarked on a dedicated program (ASSA NEO-Watch) to fill in the gaps in observational coverage of asteroids from our unique geographical location.  If you are interested in contributing to this valuable program please contact us.

E-mail to Tim Cooper  tpcoope[at]mweb.co.za

Website  http://assa.saao.ac.za/neo-watch

Mailing list  https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/assa-neo-watch/info