Planetary Society Hangout: LaserBees, Asteroids, and Planet Vacuums

Thursday, Jun 13, noon PDT/1900 UTC

Posted by Casey Dreier

2013/06/13 12:39 CDT

Topics: podcasts and videos, interview, Planetary Society Projects

Dr. Bruce Betts, Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, will join me to highlight the progress being made on some of our current programs funded by the Planetary Society, including:

LaserBees: a radical new way to deflect potentially dangerous asteroids out of harm's way
PlanetVac: seed development of technology to quickly and cheaply gather soil or regolith samples from the surface of another planet
Shoemaker Grants: we fund highly-skilled amature astronomers to search for near-Earth asteroids
More!

We'll also have an update on an upcoming live broadcast of Planetary Radio from host Mat Kaplan, and the latest on the weird budget situation at NASA regarding Planetary Science (more bad news).

Questions are encouraged! Tweet questions with hashtag #planetarylive, or post comments on our Google Plus event page or YouTube page where the video is broadcast.

I will embed the video in this post a few minutes before noon PDT. If you don't see the video, or the video is not working, please reload the page. Google Hangouts are notoriously finicky, and sometimes technical problems delay us a few minutes...

Laser Bees Spacecraft Concept

Artist’s conception of Laser Bees spacecraft swarming around a dangerous asteroid (or in this case, it uses an actual image from Deep Impact of Comet Tempel 1 to represent the threatening object).

Comments:

Bob Ware: 06/13/2013 09:26 CDT

Have they decided on what LASER firing plans to try in their research? For example, several LASERS fire at one point or several points onto the CoM (Center of Mass) for a directional push? Have they thought about a later test with their own 'home made asteroid' in free fall aboard an aircraft? One LASER on a gimbal aimed into a large vacuum sphere with a free floating home made asteroid should give them some good data points. Multi-spectral imaging of the test would be nice to have.