at NASA Small Bodies Analysis group meeting
Post-observing report of the VLT Paranal and Pictures
January 8, 2009About the Future and Current Exploration of SSSBs
January 19, 2009Good morning,
It is 5am PDT but, 8am here at the University of Maryland where I just arrived after a long flight across the US from San Francisco Airport to Dulles (Washington DC) airport. A flight overnight like this is called “red-eye” in the US. It took me a while to understand the meaning of this expression when I arrived here, until I finally took one of these flights. It is true that after not sleeping in a plane and staring at the screen in front of you for 7h, we all arrive with this physical appearance.
I am not in my hotel room at the Marriot Hotel. The meeting is starting in 30 min, so I am going to get ready making sure that I get some necessary caffeine. To summarize, the goal of this meeting is too organized our community of small solar system astronomers and give them more visibility at NASA forming an assessment group. There are already assessment groups in other disciplines such as Outer Planet or Mars Exploration, but none existed yet in the minor planet research area whereas we have various successful space missions in this area (Deep Impact for instance). The 2-day meeting organized by F. Vilas, Director of the MMT observatory will most likely bring some interesting discussions about the future exploration of small solar system bodies in the framework of NASA and other space agencies.
More news soon,
F.
