Assessment and Mitigation of Asteroid Impact Hazards

This volume is a compilation of the research presented at the International Asteroid Day workshop which was celebrated at Barcelona on June 30th, 2015. The proceedings discuss the beginning of a new era in the study and exploration of the solar system's minor bodies. International Asteroid Day commemorates the Tunguska event of June 30th, 1908. The workshop's goal was to promote the importance of dealing proactively with impact hazards from space. Multidisciplinary experts contributed to this discussion by describing the nature of comets and asteroids along with their offspring, meteoroids. New missions to return material samples of asteroids back to Earth such as Osiris-REx and Hayabusa 2, as well as projects like AIM and DART which will test impact deflection techniques for Potentially Hazardous Asteroids encounters were also covered. 

The proceedings include both an outreach level to popularize impact hazards and a scientific character which covers the latest knowledge on these topics, as well as offering proposals of promising new techniques that will help gain new insights of the properties of these challenging bodies by studying meteoroids and meteorites. Asteroids, comets, meteoroids and meteorites are introduced with descriptions of their nature, origin, and solar system pathways.



Josep M. Trigo-Rodriguez started at Castelló Planetarium in 1990, and he spent thirteen years working in the development of programs and public outreach. The last four years, he has spent as associate professor at University Jaume I of Castelló, giving lectures on Thermodynamics and Physics. In the meantime, Dr. Trigo-Rodriguez obtained his degree in Physics from the University of Valencia in 1997, his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics (Astrophysics) in 2002 under the direction of Prof. Jordi Llorca (UPC) and Prof. Juan Fabregat (UV). In 2003 he obtained a Spanish grant that allowed him to continue his career in a postdoctoral position at the Institute of Geophysics & Planetary Physics of UCLA. After almost three years working on primitive meteorites he returned to Barcelona in 2006 with a JdC grant in order to join the Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC-IEEC). In 2009, he won his position as Tenured Scientist of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) at that research institute. 


Maria Gritsevich is a Senior Scientist at the Department of Physics, University of Helsinki (UH), currently working for the ERC Advanced project SAEMPL 'Scattering and absorption of electromagnetic waves in particulate media' (PI Prof. Karri Muinonen). Prior to coming to UH, she was appointed as a Senior Scientist at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, at the Ural Federal University and at the Russian Academy of Sciences. She has also worked as a research fellow at the European Space Agency (ESA/ESTEC, with an international ESA fellowship granted to only one researcher a year), and as a Specialist Research Scientist at the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute. She obtained her M.Sc. degree (with high honors) at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University (2007), where in the following two years she also completed her Ph.D. in Physics and Mathematics. She gained crucial research experience by joining international collaborative projects, such as FP7 RASTAS SPEAR 'RAdiation-Shapes Thermal protection investigAtionS for high-SPeed EArth Re-entry', and EuroPlaNet. She received the International Academic Publishing Company 'Nauka/Interperiodica' and the Pleiades Publishing Inc. best journal publication in Physics and Mathematics award in 2009. She was awarded the Gold Medal for young scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2010.

Formerly a Professor of Mineralogy and Geochemistry at the Universität zu Köln, Institute of Mineralogy and Geochemistry, Dr. Palme has been a 1986 Fellow of the Meteoritical Society and a 2002 Fellow of the Geochemical Society. He was awarded the 2003 Leonard Medal of the Meteoritical Society, the 2006 Urey Medal of the Geochemical Society and the European Association of Geochemistry, and the 2011 Abraham-Gottlob-Werner Medaille der Deutschen Mineralogischen Gesellschaft. Now he works as a research volunteer at the Research Institute and Museum of Nature Senckenberg.