Didymos Observer Workshop 2018

Prague, Czech Republic

2018 June 19-21

  (See the whole comic here. Used with permission.)

The binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos is a planned target for the Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission. AIDA will be the first space experiment to demonstrate asteroid impact hazard mitigation by using a kinetic impactor to deflect an asteroid. It is an international cooperation, consisting of two mission elements: the NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission and the ESA HERA (previously known as AIM) rendezvous mission. The primary goals of AIDA are (i) to test our ability to perform a spacecraft impact on a potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroid and (ii) to measure and characterize the deflection caused by the impact. The AIDA target will be the secondary member (satellite) of the binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos, with the deflection experiment to occur in late September or early October, 2022. The DART impact on the secondary at 7 km/s is expected to alter the binary orbit period by about 4 minutes and this period change will be measured by Earth-based observatories. The HERA spacecraft will characterize the asteroid target and monitor results of the impact in situ at Didymos. The DART mission is a full-scale kinetic impact to deflect a 150m diameter asteroid, with known impactor conditions and with target physical properties characterized by the HERA mission.

Remote (mostly Earth-based) observations of Didymos are an important part of the mission. Their two main goals are following: 1) A pre-characterization of the target binary asteroid, which is necessary for designing and planning the spacecraft mission. 2) Measurement of a change of the secondary orbital period caused by the DART impact, which provides a back-up for a case HERA does not happen or fails.

In this workshop, we will discuss, among other things, following main topics:

Talks on related, even if non-observational topics will be welcome, as well. And we will give a plenty of time for discussion.

After the workshop there will be a 2-day trip for interested participants to the Ries-Steinheim double crater in Germany. This will be an interesting ending of the workshop, we believe.


Venue

The workshop will take place over 2.5 days, June 19 - 21, 2018, and will be held at Vila Lanna in Prague, Czech Republic.


Workshop Schedule

June 18 (Monday):
18:00-21:00 - Welcome reception

June 19 (Tuesday):
09:00-12:30 - Session 1, "Observations of Near-Earth Asteroids"
12:30-13:30 - Lunch
13:30-17:00 - Session 2, "Results from Past Observations of Didymos"
18:30-21:00 - Banquet

June 20 (Wednesday):
08:30-12:00 - Session 3, "Ground-based Telescopes"
12:00-13:00 - Lunch
13:00-17:00 - Session 4, "DART, Hera, and Future Observations"
18:30-21:00 - Dinner

June 21 (Thursday):
09:00-12:00 - Session 5, "Space-based Assets"; Closing of the meeting


Program

The science program of the meeting is available here.

Abstracts for the talks are available here. The abstracts are also listed here.


After the meeting

Selected presentations (for which we obtained permission to put them out) are available here.

Our group photo taken on June 19 in front of Vila Lanna is here.


Accommodation

The primary conference hotel is the venue Vila Lanna. We have already booked all rooms in the Vila, it is full now.

There are three suitable overflow hotels close to Vila Lanna: Hotel Schwaiger, Penzion Na Stare Poste and Penzion Marna. They are about 150, 200 and 800 meters, respectively, from Vila Lanna. Breakfast is included and car parking is available in the hotels.


Transportation

Vila Lanna is about 10 min by walking from Metro (the underground) station Hradcanska (Line A, the Green line). Metro is the easiest mean of public transportation in Prague. The standard one-way (90-min transfer) ticket costs 32 CZK. The all-day (24 hour) ticket costs 110 CZK. The 3-day (72 hour) ticket costs 310 CZK. The 30-day transferable ticket costs 670 CZK. You can buy tickets in ticket machines (coins needed) or in newsstands, or you can pay the transportation fee by sms (text) message if you have a Czech mobile phone card. A ticket machine on the Prague airport should also accept payment with contactless credit/debit card. Metro operates from 05:00 to 24:00 approximately. The connection finder may come in handy, especially if you wanted to use also buses or trams. Useful information on Prague public transportation tickets is available here.

For transfer from/to the Prague (Vaclav Havel) airport, we recommend you to use the bus line 119 between the airport and the Metro station Nadrazi Veleslavin and the Metro line A (Green) between the stations Nadrazi Veleslavin and Hradcanska. The total transportation time should be about 40 minutes. Taxis are available but are far more expensive than the bus/metro. An alternative: Prague Airport Transfers.


Registration

The registration to the workshop is closed.

The list of registered participants is available here.

The participation fee is 4800 CZK (approx. 190 EUR, or 220 USD). It covers all the events from 2018 June 18, 18:00, to June 21, 13:00, that are listed in the Workshop Schedule above. You can pay the fee at the time of registration or later. If you have already registered earlier but haven't paid the participation fee yet, and want to pay by credit/debit card now, click here.

The Europlanet 2020 RI  will support participation in the workshop for about 13 observers (both professional and amateur) from the EU inclusiveness states and early career scientists (including students) from the EU, by reimbursing their participation fees and travel and hotel expenses. Participants interested to apply for the support can find the Europlanet 2020 RI  reimbursement guidelines here, and they can mark an appropriate option upon registration (the link above).


Abstracts

Abstracts for the talks are available here. The abstracts are also listed here.


SOC and LOC

SOC:

LOC:


Acknowledgements

We are gratefull to the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic for its support to the meeting.

This workshop is supported by Europlanet 2020 RI  Work Package NA1 - Innovation through Science Networking, Task 5. The EU-project Europlanet 2020 RI  has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 654208.
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Contacts

Cristina Thomas (SOC Chair): cristina.thomas@nau.edu

Petr Pravec (LOC Chair): petr.pravec@asu.cas.cz

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