Keith’s note: I was on Al Jazeera Arabic again – this time doing a follow-up on the DART mission news and explaining the value of both detecting and deflecting potentially hazardous asteroids – by punching them. Audio below:

National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy “The National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy (Strategy) and the forthcoming National NearEarth Object Preparedness Action Plan (Action Plan) together seek to improve our Nation’s preparedness to address the hazard of near-Earth object (NEO) impacts by enhancing the integration of existing national and international assets and adding important capabilities that are currently lacking. The Strategy and Action Plan build on efforts at the National Aeronautics and […]

Asteroid thermal modeling in the presence of reflected sunlight with an application to WISE/NEOWISE observational data, arxiv.org (Revised version) “As a result, the new analysis finds asteroid diameter and other physical properties that have large differences from published NEOWISE results, with greatly increased error estimates. NEOWISE results have a claimed ±10% accuracy for diameter estimates, but this is unsupported by any calculations and undermined by irregularities in the NEOWISE results.” […]

President Obama Signs Bill Recognizing Asteroid Resource Property Rights into Law, Planetary Resources “Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company, applauds President Obama who signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (H.R. 2262) into law. This law recognizes the right of U.S. citizens to own asteroid resources they obtain and encourages the commercial exploration and utilization of resources from asteroids.” U.S. space-mining law seen leading to possible treaty violations, CBC […]

NASA: Two SLS Launches Likely Needed For $3 billion+ ARM, earlier post “At today’s Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) telecon, I asked Lindley Johnson via Webex “Can you show the chart again that has SLS as a launch option for the ARM spacecraft? Does this mean TWO SLS launches needed – one for ARM and another for crew?” He confirmed that yes, there will be two SLS launches – one […]

Is Space Mining Legal?, Popular Science “In May, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would give asteroid mining companies property rights to the minerals they extract from space. Called the Space Act of 2015, the bill now awaits the Senate’s decision. … In an article in the journal Space Policy, Fabio Tronchetti, a lawyer at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, argues that the Space Act of […]

Defending the Earth from Asteroids (Webcast) Watch live today at 11 am EDT – Neil deGrasse Tyson, Hayden Planetarium – Thomas Jones, former NASA astronaut – Russell Schweickart, former NASA astronaut, B612 Foundation – Dumitru-Dorin Prunariu, former Romanian astronaut – Soichi Noguchi, engineer and JAXA astronaut – Edward Lu, former NASA astronaut, CEO of the B612 Foundation

From B612 Foundation: “Since the government got shut down and NASA canceled the remainder of the asteroid workshop in Houston today and tomorrow, B612 decided to just go ahead and sponsor the meeting ourselves so the participants can still meet. Here is what we sent to the participants this morning: Dear Asteroid Initiative Ideas Synthesis Workshop Attendees: To keep the asteroid initiative conversation moving forward, B612 is hosting an Asteroid […]

Easily Retrievable Objects among the NEO Population, arXiv.org “Asteroids and comets are of strategic importance for science in an effort to understand the formation, evolution and composition of the Solar System. Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are of particular interest because of their accessibility from Earth, but also because of their speculated wealth of material resources. The exploitation of these resources has long been discussed as a means to lower the cost […]