NASA FISO Presentation: SHEPHERD – A Concept for Gentle Asteroid Retrieval with a Gas-Filled Enclosure
Now available is the June 24, 2015 NASA Future In-Space Operations (FISO) telecon material. The speakers were Peter Jenniskens (SETI Institute) and Bruce Damer (DigitalSpace) who discussed “SHEPHERD – A Concept for Gentle Asteroid Retrieval with a Gas-Filled Enclosure”.
Dr. Peter Jenniskens is a Dutch-American meteor astronomer with the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center. He is an expert on meteor showers and the study of natural and artificial bolides. He is author of the 790 page monograph “Meteor Showers and their Parent Comets” (Cambridge University Press) and Principal Investigator of NASA’s Stardust and Hayabusa Sample Return Capsule Reentry Observing Campaigns. He is best known for recovering, with staff and students of the University of Khartoum in Sudan, the meteorites from asteroid 2008 TC3, still the only small asteroid that was detected in space and studied before colliding with Earth.
CEO and Founder, DigitalSpace; Research Associate, UC Santa Cruz. Dr. Damer has been engaged in research and development of complex computational systems for thirty years. For the past dozen years his team at DigitalSpace performed 3D modeling and physics-based simulations for a wide range of space missions for NASA. His interest in innovative space architectures for sustainable spaceflight dates from the 1970s and culminated in 2014 with the SHEPHERD concept, co‐developed with Peter Jenniskens and Julian Nott. His other research interests include a new biochemical model for the origin of life. He is also an avid collector and chronicler of the history of computing with his DigiBarn Computer Museum.
Listen to podcast of “SHEPHERD: A Concept for Gentle Asteroid Retrieval with a Gas-Filled Enclosure” telecon:
