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The $10,000 Schweickart Prize is awarded every June to mark Asteroid Day and draw attention to risks from above — and this year's prize is going to a team of students who are proposing a panel to focus on what could happen when we start tinkering with asteroids.
The winning proposal calls for the creation of a Panel on Asteroid Orbit Alteration, which would address the emerging risks posed by unintended asteroid orbit changes. Such changes could crop up during asteroid mining operations, research missions to asteroids, or even when a spacecraft malfunctions and kicks an asteroid onto a perilous path.
The Schweickart Prize is named after Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who went on from NASA to become active in public policy and the telecommunications industry. He has long championed efforts to watch for hazardous asteroids and develop plans for planetary defense. One of his contributions to that field was to play a role in founding the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit group that raises asteroid awareness.
B612 President Danica Remy said the Schweickart Prize honors "the spirit of innovation and collaborative problem-solving" as exemplified by Schweickart. "This year's winning proposal truly embodies that spirit by anticipating a critical future challenge in space and offering a thoughtful, actionable solution to safeguard our planet," Remy said today in a news release.
The team behind the proposal is led by Jordan Stone, a Ph.D. student at Imperial College London. The other graduate students on the team are Jim Buhler of the University of Santiago de Compostela in Chile; Youssef Saleh of Cairo University in Egypt; and Kosuke Ikeya of Imperial College London.
Stone said the idea grew out of an online discussion about the potential for turning asteroids into weapons, and caught fire when his research supervisor told him about the Schweickart Prize. "I messaged our group chat for the Cosmic Futures Project to ask if anyone wanted to get involved with this idea," Stone said. That's how he got in touch with his collaborators on the winning proposal.
Four graduate students have won the 2025 Schweickart Prize, which was named in honor of Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, shown at far right. (Credit: B612 Foundation)
Finding ways to avoid sending a killer asteroid in Earth's direction may not rank that high on the list of threats to worry about in the short term — but in the long term, the issue is something that someone is going to have to pay attention to. In 2022, NASA's DART mission intentionally shot a spacecraft into an asteroid to determine how the collision affected its trajectory. The findings from DART and follow-up missions could help scientists figure out how to divert potentially threatening asteroids.
A commercial venture called AstroForge aims to go further by mining near-Earth asteroids for metals and other potentially valuable resources. AstroForge is just one of several ventures that see asteroids as a promising frontier for resource extraction. If you think this all sounds like science fiction, you wouldn't be totally wrong: Several episodes of "For All Mankind," a sci-fi series on Apple TV+, focused on a scheme to divert an asteroid for a mining operation.
So what happens if a space science mission or a mining operation goes awry, changing an asteroid's orbital path and potentially putting it on a collision course with Earth? That's the kind of existential risk that the Panel on Asteroid Orbit Alteration, or PAOA, would address.
Stone and his teammates list several possible ways that an asteroid could be knocked into a hazardous orbit — including an accidental collision with a spacecraft, an alteration of the asteroid's trajectory by removing some of its mass, an operation that leads to ejection of material from the asteroid, or even small sustained forces such as thermal radiation or a spacecraft's exhaust plumes.
Organizations such as the U.N. Office on Outer Space Activities, or UNOOSA, have considered what to do if an asteroid poses a risk due to natural causes. In 2014, UNOOSA helped establish the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group and the International Asteroid Warning Network to strengthen coordination on planetary defense. But the PAOA would take that several steps further by establishing a set of best practices for operations in the vicinity of near-Earth objects.
"We want to use that past precedent of forming the SMPAG and the IAWN as our guide to forming the panel," Stone said. "We definitely want to go through UNOOSA and COPOUS (the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space) to form it. ... What we want to do is get experts in planetary defense and orbital dynamics, people who know about how to maneuver a spacecraft around asteroids, that sort of thing, and get them to write a report."
That report would flesh out the role of the PAOA and lay out the next steps for addressing any risks that could arise once humans get serious about exploring and exploiting asteroids. "If I'm wrong about the PAOA being needed, then that's fine, as long as the risk is addressed," Stone said.
AstroForge is getting a spacecraft called Vestri ready for launch in 2026 on a mission to blaze a trail for asteroid mining. (Credit: AstroForge)
Stone said he and his teammates have run their idea past a few researchers who focus on the asteroid issue, but they haven't yet discussed it with folks from commercial space ventures. One of their suggestions would be to set up a fund to provide compensation in the event of a harmful asteroid accident, analogous to the International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds for compensating the victims of oil spills.
"We want to be careful with our messaging," Stone said. "We don't want to come across like we're trying to stop asteroid mining. It's more like we're supporting asteroid mining in a way, because we've outlined a potential hazard — which is that altering the orbits of asteroids could be very dangerous — and we'd like to figure out how to solve it."
The four students on the winning team will be awarded their $10,000 cash prize, plus a museum-quality trophy topped with a meteorite, at a ceremony to be conducted at Lowell Observatory in Arizona on Asteroid Day, June 30. Stone said that $6,000 will be donated to the Cosmic Futures Project, "and then we're taking $1,000 each for whatever we want."
Two other proposals earned honorable mentions:
- "Asteroid Impact Guidance and Information System," by Chloe Long (University of Colorado at Boulder), Anivid Pedros-Faura (UC-Boulder) and Rahil Makadia (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
- "YOSO (You Only Stack Once) for Detecting Unseen NEO Threats," by Nitya Pandey (University of Chile).
In other Asteroid Day developments:
- Dozens of Asteroid Day events are being planned around the world to mark the anniversary of the Tunguska meteor explosion in Siberia on June 30, 1908. A weekend festival in Luxembourg, the home of the Asteroid Foundation, is one of the highlights.
- Asteroid Day received formal recognition this year from the U.S. Senate as well as the city of Flagstaff and Coconino County in Arizona. Also, the first data preview from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will be released on June 30 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first Asteroid Day observances in 2015.
More about the Schweickart Prize program's winning proposals:
