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.