Former Apollo astronaut, Rusty Schweickart, is on a globe-trotting quest to raise international awareness regarding near-Earth asteroids that can threaten our planet - trying to pull together “mission rules” for dealing with a trouble-making near-Earth object (NEO).

As Chairman of the Association of Space Explorers Near-Earth Object Committee, Schweickart is organizing a set of workshops to shape a report headed in 2009 for the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS).

The first workshop was held last May in Strasbourg, France.

Next month a workshop will be held in Sibiu, Romania, followed by an April 2008 confab tentatively set for Guanacaste, Costa Rica, and a fourth workshop to be held possibly in September 2008, perhaps in the United States.

Drawing from his human spaceflight background, Schweickart sees need for a set of NEO mission rules — established well ahead of time — that outline “if this happens, this is what you will do.”

“It’s a decision-making process,” Schweickart told me, setting up criteria, rules, policies, etc., so that timely response can be made. “You can argue about mission rules for months and months…even years in some cases. But that’s what you don’t want to do when confronted with a problem.”

For more information, go to:

http://www.space-explorers.org/committees/NEO/neo.html