More than two hundred and fifty citizens, aged 18 to 82 participated in a daylong forum in Phoenix (Arizona Science Center and ASU Mercado) and Boston (Museum of Science) and a weeklong on-line forum between November 8 and 15, to share their views about asteroid and related initiatives with NASA’s decision-makers. Informing NASA’s Asteroid Initiative: A Citizen Forum is a collaboration between NASA and ECAST, an ASU CSPO-led network of universities, nonpartisan policy research organizations and informal science education centers. The project aims to capture key principles and issues that need attention and bring forward new perspectives on public views and values for NASA decision-makers.
Informed by written background material, a planetarium show and an informational video, participants engaged in facilitated small group discussions. NASA experts were available to answer clarifying questions. Discussions led to individual and group opinions about finding potentially hazardous asteroids, responding to the threat of an asteroid impact, and embarking on the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) as a stepping-stone for the journey to Mars.
The online forum was open to participants from across the country. Face-to-face forum participants were selected from a pool of over 460 applicants to be representative of the income, education, racial and ethnic diversities of the populations in Arizona and Massachusetts. An interim report capturing results from the discussion was delivered to NASA decision-makers on December 1, 2014.