Gladman on NEOSSat science team

IPS researcher and Canada Research Chair Brett Gladman is part of the core science team for the NEOSSat spacecraft, which will orbit the Earth and use its telescope to find and track asteroids closer to the Sun than Earth's orbit (including those which are potentially hazardous because they can intersect the orbit of our planet).
NEOSSat (the Near Earth Object Surveillance SATellite) is fully funded by the Canadian Space Agency, and will launch in 2010 or 2011. Alan Hildebrand of the University of Calgary is the project scientist for the mission, being built by the contractor Dynacon of Mississauga, Ontario.
Gladman, a world expert in the orbital dynamics of asteroids, will be designing a large computer model which will be used to decide the pointing strategy of the space telescope and to interpret the discoveries once the telescope begins operations.

Gladman is also a member of the CSA concept study teams for the PRIME mission to visit Phobos and the OCLE-DOCLE mission to search for distant comets as they briefly block the light of a star.