Asteroid Tagging

The Planetary Society yesterday held a press conference and issued a press release announcing the winners of its $50,000 asteroid tagging competition. From the press release:

The Apophis Mission Design Competition invited participants to compete for $50,000 in prizes by designing a mission to rendezvous with and "tag" a potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroid. Tagging would allow scientists to track an asteroid accurately enough to determine whether it will impact Earth, thus helping governments decide whether to mount a deflection mission to alter its orbit.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) co-sponsored The Planetary Society’s competition and will review the best mission designs offered. The winning designs will also be presented by The Planetary Society to other world space agencies.

The near-Earth asteroid, Apophis, was used as the target for the mission design because it will come closer to Earth in 2029 than the orbit of our geostationary satellites. (That’s close enough to be visible to the naked eye.) If it passes through a small “keyhole” as it travels by Earth, its trajectory could be diverted so that it will impact Earth in 2036. Current estimates do rate the probability of such an impact as very low.

The first place prize of $25,000 went to a U.S. team led by Spaceworks Engineering (Atlanta, GA) for their mission, named Foresight. European teams took the second and third place prizes ($10,000 and $5,000, respectively). Another $10,000 was distributed to the winners of the student competition.

The BBC News covered the announcement in this article.
[Thanks to georgef for the heads up on this one.]