How We're Finding Asteroids Before They Find Us

Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - 11:08 in Astronomy & Space

Data Visualization by Jan Willem Tulp Marco Tantardini spent the year of 2010 dreaming about asteroids. A thickly bearded, 26-year-old Italian who wore a black-leather jacket and rode a motorcycle, Tantardini looked more like Hemingway in his later years than a buttoned-down space wonk. He had done internships at The Planetary Society and NASA but those were finished. He had gotten a master’s degree in space engineering but hadn’t sought a traditional job. Instead, at his parents’ house in the Italian town of Cremona, he sat in the same room where he did his homework growing up and drafted a plan to catch an asteroid. He called the mission Sisyphus Victorious, and he believed it would be the next giant leap for human exploration. Unlike the Sisyphus of Greek mythology, who was sentenced to endlessly push a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back...

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