Dr. Don Yeomans
January 22, 2021 - 01:31 PM
(2014) Dr. Don Yeomans - Near-Earth Objects: Finding Them Before They Find Us
Dr. Don Yeomans is now retired from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he is a JPL Fellow and a Senior Research Scientist. He was the Radio Science team chief for NASA’s Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission. He also was the NASA Project Scientist for the successful Japanese mission to land upon, and return a sample from, a near-Earth asteroid Itokawa and he was a scientific investigator on NASA’s Deep Impact mission that successfully impacted comet Tempel 1 in July 2005 and flew past comet Hartley 2 in November 2010. He provided the accurate predictions that led to the recovery of comet Halley at Palomar Observatory on October 16, 1982 and allowed the discovery of 164 BC Babylonian observations of comet Halley on clay tablets in the British Museum. From 1998 through early 2015 (when he retired), Don Yeomans was the manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL, an office that is responsible for providing predictions for the future close Earth approaches and impacts by comets and asteroids. Asteroid “2956” was renamed asteroid “2956 Yeomans” to his professional achievements and in 2013, Don Yeomans was named as of the 100 most influential persons by Time magazine.