The Past, Present, and Future of Asteroid Exploration

Jay McMahon – UC Boulder

In this talk I will briefly review the past missions to asteroids including NEAR, Hayabusa, Dawn, and Hayabusa2. I will then delve a bit deeper talking about OSIRIS-REx and DART – two recent NASA missions that I was a part of. For each of these missions, I will show some details about the asteroids that were explored, and some of the main scientific and technological advances for these missions. I will then discuss the plans for the current/upcoming Hera, Lucy, Psyche, and Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt. Finally, I will close with some discussion of technologies that we have been developing to support future exploration of and interaction with asteroids in the solar system.