Planetary Defense Blog and Apophis Contests

Planetary Defense blog has a recent post on a conversation at the Space Investment Summit with Bruce Betts from the Planetary Society. According to the post, the judging for the Apophis Mission Design Competition will probably be finished by January (a bit delayed).

Planetary Defense blog has a lot more on Apophis, by the way. Just use the blog search bar to find more articles on it. One cool post gives some links to articles on, and project websites for, various entries in the Apophis contest. I've posted about the SpaceWorks/SpaceDev entry, but there are details about entries from aerospace power Astrium, universities (GIT, MIT, and University of Michigan), and a couple other teams. One paper from Orbital isn't confirmed as an entry, but it's for an Apophis rendezvous mission. The University of Michigan site gets a special link here for a professional-looking site that appears (to my eye, which admittedly is a mostly or entirely untrained one in the spacecraft engineering disciplines) to cover all the bases (although I was hoping that "Proposal" button would work for me so I could see the results!).

Here's another Planetary Defense blog post on a visit to the Georgia Tech Apophis team, including a link to the presentation and the class website.

Finally, here's a Planetary Defense post (with appropriate links, of course) on an AIAA student design competition to characterize (not tag, this time) Apophis.