Asteroid Adventures

Asteroids were for years considered ‘celestial vermin’ – objects which got in the way of more interesting fodder for astronomers. Now, they are central to our Solar System’s story, the building blocks from which planets are made, and capable of telling us the history of the last five billion years.

This lecture considered two missions – Lucy, which flies past asteroid DonaldJohanson in April 2025, and OSIRIS-ReX, which recently returned from the threateningly near-Earth asteroid Bennu carrying samples of this unusual world.

Click to access R_2025_04_22_1826_Lintott_T%20FINAL.pdf

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14148

https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EPSC2024/EPSC2024-561.html

Mainzer et al 2017, ‘NEOWISE Reactivation Mission Year Three: Asteroid Diameters and Albedos’, Astronomical Journal, 154, 4, 168 https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.09504

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025NatAs…9..199G/abstract

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025Natur.637.1072M/abstract

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/lucy/

Professor Chris Lintott

Gresham Professor of Astronomy (2023-)

Professor Chris Lintott is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at New College.

Having been educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and University College London, his research now ranges from understanding how galaxies form and evolve, to using machine learning to find the most unusual things in the Universe, to predicting the properties of visiting interstellar asteroids. He is Principal Investigator of the Zooniverse citizen science platform, which provides opportunities for more than two million online volunteers to contribute to scientific research, and which was the topic of his first book, ‘The Crowd and the Cosmos’.

Professor Lintott is best known for presenting the BBC’s long-running Sky at Night program, and as an accomplished lecturer. Away from work, he cooks, suffers through being a fan of Torquay United and Somerset cricket, and spends time with a rescued lurcher, Mr Max, with whom he presents the Dog Stars podcast.