Five Missions to Asteroids - Dart, Lucy, Psyche, Haybusa2, and OSIRIS-REx - The Cosmic Companion 23 Nov. 2021

This week on Astronomy News with The Cosmic Companion, we take a close-up look at asteroids – those lumps or rock, metal, and ice racing around our solar system. We're going to examine five major missions happening right now, examining asteroids, and potentially, saving us from the fate of the dinosaurs.

Bill Bottke, Director of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) joins us talking about the Psyche mission, exploring a metal-rich asteroid for the first time.

We will also be joined by Esen Ercan Alp, senior physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, one of the few people in the world studying samples from the asteroid Ryugu returned from Haybusa2.

In addition, we examine the Dart mission – the first-ever test in space, deflecting an asteroid by impacting it with a spacecraft!

Together, we explore the OSIRIS-REx mission to Bennu, and hear from Cathy Olkin of SwRI, telling us of the journey of Lucy to the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter.

All this and more in this week's episode of Astronomy News with The Cosmic Companion!

Next week 30 November (s5/e20): Matthew Bothwell talks about his new book, The Invisible Universe. He’ll tell us about the Universe we can’t see with our eyes. Subscribe or follow today and never miss an episode!

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