Awash in a Stream of Asteroids: Using ground-based facilities to observe NEO "fly-bys"

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Dr. Nicholas Moskovitz is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This project is focused on understanding the physical and compositional properties of asteroids as they pass by Earth at very small distances. The fellow will explore an area of planetary science that has only recently been enabled by the rapid rate of new near-Earth asteroid (NEO) discoveries. This will not only have wide implications for understanding the compositional and physical properties of NEOs but will also be relevant to multidisciplinary studies involving the topics of impact hazards, meteoritics and cosmochemistry, space craft missions, radar astronomy, and Solar System dynamics.With steadily increasing numbers of catalogued NEOs, investigators are reaching a point where close encounters with Earth are no longer detected just a few days beforehand but can be predicted months or years in advance. During close encounters small bodies in unexplored size regimes become observationally accessible across a wide range of wavelengths and with a variety of ground-based facilities. The fellow will take advantage of these encounters by conducting targeted spectroscopic and photometric campaigns in each year of his fellowship. These observations will (1) provide insight on the compositional properties of small asteroids, (2) establish links between meteorites on Earth and their immediate parent bodies in space, (3) investigate the role of observing geometry on reflectance measurements of planetary bodies, and (4) look for asteroid surface heterogeneity which could provide clues about regolith and thermo-physical properties.The broader impacts of this project include a significant educational component. The fellow's educational plan involves a combination of mentoring, curriculum development, and teaching, all focused on training undergraduates in innovative ways on the foundations of observational astronomy. The fellow will mentor several undergraduates over the course of the fellowship in a structured manner using inquiry-based methods. By the second year the fellow will have developed a set of lessons and exercises that he will incorporate and teach in an observational astronomy course. The program is designed to not only advance the learning and understanding of undergraduates through personalized mentoring and real research projects, but it will also incorporate new components into MIT?s observational astronomy course. The undergraduates involved in this program will receive at an early stage in their careers the training necessary for future success as observational astronomers. In the long-term this experience will provide the fellow an opportunity to develop a course curriculum that can continue to be implemented in the years beyond this fellowship. More broadly, the topic of NEO close encounters garners significant public curiosity and provides an excellent opportunity for the fellow to give public talks to enhance scientific understanding within our society throughout his fellowship.