SBAG 14: Day 2

The Small Bodies Assessment Group meeting continues today.

Agenda (pdf)

Live video feed

Yesterday's presentations about New Horizons by Alan Stern can be watched here.

Several interesting presentations should happen today. A presentation from the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) team, Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment by Andy Rivkin, and current Phase A Discovery class missions to small bodies where we will hopefully get more details about them.

I will attempt to track down all of yesterday's talks and all future talks from the meeting and post them here in an easy to locate place. It was suggested that there will be a location on the SBAG website with links to them, but I haven't yet seen anything from this meeting or previous meetings that would facilitate this.

Update: I've been in contact with SBAG in regards to the recorded video material. Apparently there is no intention to provide links to this video content. I have an email out to several committee members in regards to this as well. I'm unsure if there are restrictions to the presentations that would prevent the videos from being distributed, but I suspect that there just isn't any plan to provide access. The New Horizons presentation link was provided in error yesterday. However, I will leave the link live for as long as it works.

Requiring people to watch these meetings live to gain access to the discussed information is rather unfortunate in my opinion. Most people have jobs that would essentially prevent access the information entirely, aside from the provided PDF slide presentations, which may or may not include descriptive text for each panel. I am absolutely sure there are many people out there that have an interest in the information being discussed at the SBAG meeting but are unable to attend or watch due to schedule conflicts. By denying access to the video content, I feel that its just another closed door in the face of an interested public. Outreach is imperative to maintain an interested public and all they need to do for outreach, is to provide content to keep the public interested and wanting more. /endrant