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Projects: Shoemaker NEO Grants

About the Shoemaker NEO Grant Program

The Planetary Society’s Gene Shoemaker NEO Grant program seeks to assist amateur observers, observers in developing countries, and under-funded professional observers contributing to vital NEO research.  Since 1997, the Society has awarded 29  Shoemaker NEO grants totaling more than $184,000 to observers around the world. The grants are solely funded by the dues and donations of Planetary Society members, whose voluntary dues and donations help support targeted research and development programs in a number of areas.

Grant recipients have played critical roles in tracking small asteroids that were discovered by major asteroid survey programs, and providing the crucial follow-up observations to determine precise orbits for these objects. For example, the Czech Republic-based group led by Jana Ticha, who won a grant in 2000, has discovered three NEOs in the last 5 years, and confirmed 520 other newly discovered NEOs during the same period. In 2006 alone, Australian John Broughton, a 2002 grant winner, discovered two NEOs and two comets, while 2002 grant winner Roy Tucker made 47,000 astrometric (position) measurements from his observing site in Arizona.  2005 grant winner David Higgins, another Australian, has participated in observations that have shown three NEOs to be binaries.  And Broughton's April 11, 2004 discovery of 2004 GA1 is possibly the first amateur discovery of a large, potentially-hazardous NEO. Read the project updates for further information on these and other activities of past grant winners.

Through these observations and others, supported by Society members and their donations, the Society is playing an active role in helping to ‘retire’ some of the risk of impact from NEOs and to reveal the properties of these interesting and valuable targets for future exploration.