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Announcing the Winners

The Planetary Society has awarded $50,000 to seven winners of the Apophis Mission Design Competition. First place went to the team led by SpaceWorks Engineering, Inc. of Atlanta, Georgia in conjunction with SpaceDev, Inc., Poway, California for their mission, entitled Foresight. The Georgia Institute of Technology, also coincidentally in Atlanta, Georgia, took first place in the student category, winning $5,000. Jonathan Sharma, a student in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, was Principal Investigator for a mission design entitled Pharos.

» Announcement of the Winners
» The Winning Proposals
» The Winning Teams
» The Judging Panel
» Competition Rules

The Apophis Mission Design Competition invited participants to compete for $50,000 in prizes by designing a mission to rendezvous with and "tag" a potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroid. Tagging would allow scientists to track an asteroid accurately enough to determine whether it will impact Earth, thus helping governments decide whether to mount a deflection mission to alter its orbit.

The near-Earth asteroid, Apophis, was used as the target for the mission design because it will come closer to Earth in 2029 than the orbit of our geostationary satellites. (That's close enough to be visible to the naked eye.) If it passes through a small "keyhole" as it travels by Earth, its trajectory could be diverted so that it will impact Earth in 2036. Current estimates do rate the probability of such an impact as very low.

The competition received 37 mission proposals from 20 countries on 6 continents. If Earth were ever going to mount a defense against a dangerous asteroid, international cooperation would be vital in protecting the planet. That spirit of international cooperation was exemplified by the second and third place teams.

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