Planetary Defense Conference
Experts from around the world unite to discuss near-earth objects
Tomorrow will be the first day of the 2019 IAA Planetary Defense Conference. The conference will take place in the Washington DC area in the USA this year, and will last the entire week.
This year’s conference is the 6th global conference, which takes place every two years. In it, experts from all over the world meet in an effort to share new findings related to near earth objects (NEOs) and other planetary defense topics.
NEOs include asteroid and comets that orbit our Sun and come within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit. This year is special for NASA, as they will be talking about the current effort to demonstrate a technique to change the motion of an asteroid in the hopes of having a better understanding of what to do in the case an asteroid ever headed for the Earth. NASA’s effort will be carried out through the JHU-APL mission DART of which we have spoken in previous posts.
This year’s conference is sure to be exciting, starting with an opening Keynote by NASA Administrator James Bridenstine and with appearances by Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye.
The conference’s program also includes some really cool simulations related to DART’s kinetic impact, and includes discussions around current observation of Didymos in support of the DART mission. Perhaps even more exciting will be the talk about DRACO, the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for OpNav, which will be used to track the Asteroid before hitting it!
Other talks will include talks about asteroid Ryugu and NEO observations made using the UH-2.2m Telescope.
Look out for updates to this story as the conference goes on throughout the week!
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