Apophis Winners Announced by Planetary Society

Recently I mentioned that the Apophis Mission Design winners were expected to be announced soon (I don't know why I didn't just give the date since the Bruce Betts interview said it was today). Now, RLV News has a number of links to key information about the winners. The proposal offered by SpaceWorks Engineering, which I discussed here when the nice, focused proposal was publicized, was the winner with a $25,000 prize. There were several other winners in professional and university categories. You can see discussion of some of the teams that eventually turned out to be winners in this post about some Apophis information that I found at the Planetary Defense blog.

Speaking of Planetary Defense (linked on the right), that blog has had a recent interface overhaul. Most importantly today, though, it has a detailed collection of links about the announcement. I think they were particularly pleased at which team won the competition!

As Planetary Defense said, congratulations to the winning teams. Not only that, but congratulations to all the other teams that contributed to this effort that might turn out to be extremely important, and congratulations to the Planetary Society for this competition that raised awareness of the issue, gave numerous professional and university teams something to focus on, and produced engineering proposals that may form the basis of future space missions.