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Asteroid Grand Challenge Releases “Find Them Now” Video

With support from the NASA Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI), the NASA Asteroid Grand Challenge (AGC) ran a challenge on Tongal.com to develop a short video describing the work being done to detect, track, characterize, and mitigate potentially hazardous asteroids.

The NASA Asteroid Grand Challenge (AGC) ran a challenge to develop a short video describing the work being done to detect, track, characterize, and mitigate potentially hazardous asteroids.
We believe working together we can protect our planet from potentially harmful asteroids. This video, and other efforts like it, are part of a large scale endeavor to use multi-disciplinary collaborations to solve the Asteroid Grand Challenge. Credits: NASA

The video challenge was opened to public submissions on October 19, 2015. The NASA team received over 600 ideas of 140 characters or less which were narrowed down to four possible pitch concepts. Cascadium Pictures of Brooklyn, New York submitted the winning pitch for the opportunity to produce this AGC video.

The NASA Asteroid Grand Challenge worked with Cascadium to create a narrative around a fictional asteroid named “Arthur”. JL Galache of the Minor Planet Center narrates how the asteroid would be detected by the NEOWISE project and other tools used by the NASA Planetary Defense Coordination Office. Arthur’s spin, size, composition and mass would be determined using radar, astrometry, ground and space-based infrared spectroscopy, and light curve analysis.

We believe working together we can protect our planet from potentially harmful asteroids. We thank CoECI, Tongal, Cascadium Pictures, and those who submitted ideas for their contributions to this project. This video, and other efforts like it, are part of a large scale endeavor to use multi-disciplinary collaborations to solve the Asteroid Grand Challenge.

“As we look out from our small outpost into this vast galaxy, scanning the night sky for threats to our home planet, our continued survival depends on the three rules of asteroid planetary protection:

Find them early.
Find them soon.
Find them now.”