ESA Planetary Defense Student Competion

The European Space Agency is holding a competition for the upcoming Planetary Defense Conference in 2009, in order to stimulate some innovative research and encourage European research students to participate. The Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) has come up with a few concepts that young researchers from various fields may wish to research. They have identified the following concepts as potentially interesting:

• Deflecting Binary asteroid systems
• Graveyard orbit deflection
• Deflection strategies using multiple spacecraft
• The Magnetostatic Tractor
• Lorentz Deflection during an Earth fly-by

See here for more details.