There are many ways of NEO mitigation; one possible way is blasting these things. But before you blast something, you want to know of what it is made and what its density is. If you don’t, you could make the problem worse, and so it is very important we started characterizing the geophysical properties of asteroids before we start developing any mitigation schemes.

NTB: What commercial applications could come from Ames’ projects?

Bicay: Ames as has long had substantial IT expertise. We have a partner nearby, Google, who is now working with Ames in some joint collaborative R&A efforts. The first real manifestation of the memorandum of understanding that Ames signed with Google some time in the past year is an agreement by Google to actually support a handful of up to 10 people here at Ames to work on an enhancement of Google Earth with an eye towards incorporating lunar imagery, and so there will be a “Google Moon” eventually. I’m sure it’s not too hard to predict that Google wants to do the same thing for Mars and perhaps other planetary surfaces also. That’s just one manifestation of mating the expertise we have here at Ames with the local venture capital firms and the high technology of Silicon Valley towards a host of commercial applications.

Another area where the commercial world is increasingly interested in collaborating with us is the life sciences. This is a discipline or an area of science that’s been relatively de-emphasized, or at least aspects of it, by the agency over the last couple of years. But there are some important capabilities we have here in-house that are increasingly of interest to local companies in Silicon Valley. A small example: we have an experiment flying in space now on a commercial payload that does a genetic assay of samples that have been sent into space. It performs a gene expression experiment to help characterize variations in the genetic properties as a function of low gravity and high radiation. Eventually, when NASA becomes serious about long-duration outposts on the Moon or on Mars, the agency will have to take things like high radiation doses and weightlessness much more seriously than they have had to for low Earth-orbit flights and for the Apollo excursions on the Moon. There is suggestive evidence that the combination of low gravity and high radiation over extending periods of time have debilitating effects on the human system, and most of the research in this area, ironically, has been done overseas by the Russians. And as NASA points to longer-duration stays in outer space, I think the agency will be increasingly interested in understanding these effects and how to remediate them.

NTB: What are the goals for Ames?