This year, the British Science Week Lecture is taking place on Wednesday 11th March (7.30pm-9pm) at Putteridge Bury
Near-Earth Asteroids: A matter of life and death?
Asteroids, which mostly orbit between Mars and Jupiter, are the remaining fragments of bodies which never coalesced into planets, and retain material that has been relatively unaltered since the earliest stages of the formation of the Solar System. Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) provide a link between this primordial reservoir and the meteorites we collect on the Earth and are the most accessible Solar System objects for space missions.
NEAs pose a potential threat to life on Earth, being implicated in past mass extinctions, but may also have brought the building blocks of life to the Earth and created the ecological space for humans to evolve.
Simon Green, Professor of Planetary and Space Science at The Open University, has studied NEAs through ground- and space-based observations since his discovery of the unusual asteroid (3200) Phaethon in 1983. He has worked on numerous space missions including Giotto, Cassini, Stardust and Rosetta. In this lecture, he will focus on current and future space missions to NEAs to understand the origins of the Solar System and life, and how to prevent a potential future asteroid impact on the Earth.
Tickets are free, but places are limited.
Click below to reserve your place:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/british-science-week-lecture-2020-tickets-88739565429
