Iowa State’s Asteroid Deflection Research Center (ADRC), established in April 2008, has won its first contract to develop technologies to mitigate the threat to Earth posed by asteroids. The Iowa Space Grant Consortium (ISGC), a NASA-supported organization, will award more than $300,000 over three years for the project led by ADRC director and Vance D. Coffman Chair Professor in Aerospace Engineering Bong Wie.
Selected from a field of three finalists, Wie’s proposal, “Development of Integrated System Architectures and Innovative Technologies for Near-Earth Object Surveys and Threat Mitigation,” includes plans for collaborations with other groups and development into a self-sustaining program, one of the criteria for the ISGC grants. The award is the first asteroid mitigation/deflection research project to be funded by NASA, according to Wie.
In addition, the ADRC sponsored an Asteroid Deflection Research Symposium last October in Arlington, Virginia, in order to exchange technical information and develop an integrated multidisciplinary R&D program for asteroid deflection/fragmentation using high-energy as well as low-energy options. Attendees included planetary defense researchers from NASA, the U.S. Air Force, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the National Research Council, among others.