About this Event

The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum will present a Virtual Astronomy Live program on Thursday, September 17 from 5:30pm-7:00pm EST, a free event that explores Asteroids in our Solar System. Asteroids may be small but studying them could help scientists unravel some big mysteries. The space rocks are fossils from the birth of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago — celestial fragments that never managed to grow into planets. Currently, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx’s mission is actually scheduled to land on the asteroid Bennu on October 20, 2020 for a five second sample collecting mission. The spacecraft is scheduled to return the sample to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023. This conversation will detail what scientists hope to learn from the mission and how the techniques developed to gather this sample lay the foundation for the future of spaceflight and exploration.

The event is hosted and co-produced by John “Das” Galloway, founder of the Kerbal Space Academy, and moderated by Summer Ash, an astrophysicist, rocket scientist and freelance writer.

This is the sixth in a monthly series of Virtual Astronomy Live programs.