Scientists from the Department of Physical Sciences are embarking on a 5.8m euro study funded by the European Commission’s Framework 7 programme.
The project is called ‘NEOShield: A Global Approach to Near-Earth Object Impact Threat Mitigation’ and is being undertaken by an international consortium of Universities, Research Institutes and Industry. The OU’s contribution, from Simon Green, Manish Patel and Tim Ringrose, is to perform laboratory experiments to simulate high speed impacts into asteroid surfaces to determine the efficiency of momentum transfer from a kinetic impact mitigation spacecraft.
You can find out more about NeoShield here.
9 February 2011