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Space Studies Board Annual Report 2002 (2003) / Chapter Skim
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5 Congressional Testimony
Pages 105-108

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From page 105...
... These surveys lay out the community's research goals for the next decade, identify key questions that need to be answered, and propose new facilities with which to conduct this fundamental research. In April 2001, NASA Associate Administrator for Space Science Edward Weller asked the NRC to conduct a similar survey for planetary exploration.
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From page 106...
... Information especially relevant to hazard mitigation includes knowledge of the internal structures of nearEarth asteroids and comets, their degree of fracture and the presence of large core pieces, the fractal dimensions of their structures, and their degree of cohesion or friction. While almost all of the SSE Survey's recommendations involved NASA flight missions, the Primitive Bodies subpanel recommended that ground-based telescopes be used to do a majority of the study of NEOs, supplemented by airborne and orbital telescopes.
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From page 107...
... To do this, NASA relies on research grants to individual observers who must gain access to their own facilities. The large NEOs are being efficiently discovered using small telescopes for which NASA provides instrumentation funding, but all the other solar system populations—e.g., comets, Centaurs, satellites of the outer planets, and Kuiper Belt objects are being characterized almost entirely using non-NASA facilities.
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From page 108...
... The ability to create and play a "motion picture" of the night sky will also provide new insights in a wide variety of disciplines from cosmology to astrophysics to solar system exploration. A suitable analog might be the deepened knowledge that is obtained from dynamic movies of swirling clouds and weather patterns, as compared to an occasional static photo.
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