| Session Details | |
| Section | PS - Planetary Sciences |
| Session Title | Solar System Primitive Body Exploration Missions |
| Main Convener | Dr. Jian-Yang Li (Planetary Science Institute, United States) |
| Co-convener(s) | Dr. Makoto Yoshikawa (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Japan) Dr. Lucy McFadden (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, United States) Dr. Sebastien Besse (European Space Agency, Spain) Dr. Liang Chang (Chinese Academy of Science, China) |
| Session Description | This session welcomes abstracts about the results from all the past and ongoing small body missions, by combining multiple missions, as well as new concepts for future missions. Solar system small bodies, including all asteroids and comets, are considered the best-preserved fossils from the early era of planetary systems formation. As either the original building blocks (planetesimals) that have undergone little, if any internal heating and thermal evolution, or the collisional debris of proto-planets that are frozen shortly after their formation, the physical status, composition, and evolution of small bodies are the key to seeing through to the beginning of the solar system. Small bodies could also have played an important role in delivering water and organics to the inner solar system, relevant to the origin of habitable worlds and life. Small body exploration missions have tremendously revolutionized our understanding of the formation of the planetary system with their paradigm changing results. In the context of past and current missions, such as Giotto, NEAR, Deep Impact, Stardust, EPOXI, Stardust-NExT, Hayabusa, Rosetta, and Dawn, as well as the potential future missions such as Hayabusa2, OSIRIS-REx, and potentially Lucy, Psyche, AIDA, and the Japanese solar sail mission to Trojan asteroids, it is now the time to both combine the mission results to enhance scientific returns of these missions, and to help us develop concepts for future small body explorations. |