University of Central Florida astrophysicist Humberto Campins in
one of a handful of Americans invited to speak at an
international space meeting aimed at showing Europeans why space
missions to bring back samples from asteroids are vital to our
future. The two-day meeting in Paris runs Dec. 17-18 at the
Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the French agency
responsible for shaping and implementing that government’s space
policy in Europe. The CNES organized the event and selected its
speakers. Campins, an international expert on asteroids, led a
team of scientists who first discovered water ice and organic
molecules on an asteroid in 2010. He also is a member of the
NASA team now preparing the OSIRIS-REx mission, which will bring
back a sample from a nearby asteroid and is scheduled for launch
in 2016. Campins also is a member of the MarcoPolo-R mission,
which the European Space Agency has approved for further study.
The MarcoPolo-R spacecraft could be launched by 2020-22 to
return samples from another