The Coordinator (CNRS) is responsible for the overall management of the project, including maintaining the schedule, monitoring progress with respect to milestones and deliverables, and troubleshooting any problems that threaten to impede progress. The Coordinator is the single point-of-contact with the European Commission and takes responsibility for the provision of progress reports and other documents as and when necessary.
The Project Management Team (PMT) will act on the behalf of CNRS to oversee the project-wide activities and ensure the compliance of NEO-MAPP with the provisions of the Grant and Consortium agreements. The PMT will be responsible for the administrative and financial management, follow-up of project progress including the monitoring of timely delivery of key deliverables, identification of risks and related contingency plans. The PMT will coordinate the preparation of Periodic and Final reports.
The Advisory Board
The Advisory Board of the project consists of two experienced senior experts in asteroid space missions who will help to maximize the impact of the project, and one astrophysicist whose celebrity and expertise in stereo images will help to maximize the visibility of the project. The members of the Advisory Board are not part of the consortium, but provide knowledge, advice and key support from an external perspective. One Advisory Board member (Dr. Cheng, John Hopkins University, USA), is the co-lead of the DART mission, currently in Phase C study at NASA, to be launched in 2021 to perform the first kinetic impactor test on the moon of Didymos in October 2022. DART is part of the AIDA project, which includes the Hera mission currently under study at ESA. Therefore, the involvement of the DART co-lead in our Advisory Board is natural. Another Advisory Board member (Pr. Yoshikawa) belongs to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and is the project manager of the Hayabusa2 mission that currently visits the asteroid Ryugu to return samples to Earth in 2020 and is also the JAXA representative at the Space mission Program Advisory Group (SMPAG), which reports on the response to the asteroid hazard at UNCOPUOS.