This is a 2 hour Video of the Announcement NASA made today about their new "commitment" to spearhead asteroid research.

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5rsJwsyni4

Great news!

What about some bucks for ATI/NVIDIA App for Asteroids@home? :)

p.

This could be important for A@H

I've read in a german newspaper that only 14 objects have fitting trajectories for the announced mission to redirect an asteroid.
But there seems to be still a lack of knowledge about spin and shape of ten of these objects.

Especially a slow spin would be important for a fitting target, because a faster spin could crash the robot.
I've asked myself:

- Are these informations (spin&shape of asteroids) not especially products of A@H's research?
- couldn't we provide NASA with the demanded informations (i think 10 asteroids are ~ 3000 WUs)?
- wouldn't it be good to contact these NASA guys? (these seem to be the qualified contacts, especially Paul Chodas
http://neocam.ipac.caltech.edu/page/team)

If A@H could make contact and, maybe, an agreement, this could result in a huge boost for the project.

Am I wrong?

Maybe i expressed myself unclear - sorry.
I would really like to know why the NASA lacks knowledge (spin&shape of asteroids) when we could deliver it.
AFAIK are we able to calculate the relevant parameters using the lightcurve inversion method - as long as there was a sufficient number of lightcurves observed. To be honest, i think thats the whole purpose of the project?

Because i know that many unnecessary work (everywhere) is done because of the lack of contact, communication and cooperation, i would like following to know:
Are there any reasons why it shouldn't be a good idea to contact the NASA staff and tell them about A@H?
Wouldn't it be a good idea when such a contact would be initiated by a qualified person?

Or is the lightcurve inversion method not accurate enough? Is it to ineffective?

Would Mr. Durech be so kind to explain that to me? That would be very nice.

The A@H project can in principle deliver spin&shape of asteroids interesting for NASA if there are enough sparse photometric data (which is unlikely for small near-Earth asteroids). But if NASA selects an asteroid, the first thing they should do is to get more data, dense lightcurves in particular, to derive the rotation period. Once the rotation period is roughly known, there's no need for A@H because the parameter space we need to search is small and it can be done on a single PC.

The aim of A@H is to process sparse-in-time photometry (which means unknown rotation period and a large interval of periods that has to be scanned) of most of the known asteroids and derive period/spin/shape models when possible. Concentrating on selected asteroids usually means their rotation period is known and they are processed (with the same lightcurve inversion technique) outside the A@H project.

As regards contacting NASA, I think we formally missed the deadline for the Request for Information (July 18).

Thank you very much for your kind reply.

I appreciate your explanations (when demanded) very much, in fact they are one of the reasons why I support this project.

http://www.universetoday.com/106733/nasa-plans-to-deepen-asteroid-searches-with-planetary-resources/