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CU Professor Partners With Lockheed Martin To Study Binary Asteroids

Asteroid imager rendering

Dr. Dan Scheeres was in Japan waiting for an important announcement that took an extra day to come. He found out his plan to study binary asteroids was allowed to proceed by NASA.

“We want to send two small spacecraft so we can also see what the temperature of the surface is,” Scheeres, a professor at University of Colorado Boulder said.

The Janus Mission is a partnership with Lockheed Martin. The plan is to send two suitcase-sized instruments into orbit and monitor two very different binary asteroids. The binary asteroid is a larger asteroid and a smaller orbiting asteroid.