In France, the Study and Information Group on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (GEIPAN), has been investigating unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs)—more commonly known as UFOs—for the past 45 years. Attached to the National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), GEIPAN has been invited by NASA to present its activities and working methods before a newly established independent team that will study data and set up methods to analyze unusual phenomena observed in the sky.

Set up in 1977, GEIPAN is a team of four experts tasked with gathering witness accounts, conducting surveys, publishing studies, managing computer systems and overseeing the organization's operations. A technical department at CNES, it relies on outside personnel, expertise and talent, liaising with numerous investigators, experts and institutions, including France's Air Force, National Gendarmerie and Police Force, the Directorate General for Civil Aviation, the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the weather service Météo-France.

About a decade ago, the prospect of "asteroid mining" saw a massive surge in interest. This was due largely to the rise of the commercial space sector and the belief that harvesting resources from space would soon become a reality. What had been the stuff of science fiction and futurist predictions was now being talked about seriously in the business sector, with many claiming that the future of resource exploitation and manufacturing lay in space. Since then, there's been a bit of a cooling off as these hopes failed to materialize in the expected timeframe.

Nevertheless, there is little doubt that a human presence in space will entail harvesting resources from Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and beyond. In a recent paper, a team of researchers from the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China, examined the potential impact of asteroid mining on the global economy.

Recently, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed into a 170 m asteroid Dimorphos at 6.6 km/s, as the first on-orbit demonstration of deflecting an asteroid by kinetic impact. The DART spacecraft was set to impact the center of Dimorphos nearly head-on. Earth-based telescopes have now confirmed that impact successfully changed Dimorphos' orbit period by 32 minutes, much more than expected.

But, where should we impact an asteroid to most effectively deflect its orbit? Simply towards the center of the asteroid? These questions have yet to be well investigated.

In a new paper published in the Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, researchers of Tsinghua University proposed an optimal kinetic-impact geometry to improve the effective magnitude of kinetic-impact deflection, which should promote our understanding of how to make full use of a kinetic impactor and get best results.