The Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday afternoon at 2:30pm about near Earth objects (NEOs). This may be one of the most detailed examinations of the topic by Congress in quite some time: the hearing will feature six witnesses split into two panels. The first will include Wayne Van Citters, director of the astronomical sciences division at the NSF; and Lindley Johnson, NEO program manager at NASA Headquarters. The second includes Grant Stokes, who runs the LINEAR asteroid search program at MIT Lincoln Labs; Michael Griffin of APL; and former astronaut Rusty Schweickart and current astronaut Ed Lu, who serve as chairman of the board and president, respectively, of the B612 Foundation, an organization that advocates “significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner by 2015.”
It looks like this hearing has Pete Worden’s fingerprints all over it: he has long advocated increased efforts to detect NEOs, and he is currently working for Sen. Sam Brownback, who chairs the subcommittee holding this hearing. Interesting, the same day Worden is participating in a roundtable on “Private Sector Opportunities in President Bush’s New Space Vision”, organized by the Marshall Institute. The discussion, scheduled for noon, was moved last week to a room in the Russell Senate Office Building because interest in the topic forced organizers to find a larger venue. The meeting announcement doesn’t specify an ending time but you can bet it will be done well before 2:30…
