US judge dismisses challenge to border laptop searches

U.S. Customs and Border Protection can search travelers' laptops and other electronic devices without a show of reasonable suspicion, according to a federal judge's dismissal of a 2010 lawsuit on Tuesday.

In its suit, the American Civil Liberties Union had argued that having border officials search the contents of a laptop violated the U.S Constitution unless the officials had a reasonable suspicion that the contents related to a crime. Judge Edward Korman of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn, disagreed and threw out the suit. The ACLU said an appeal is being considered.

"We're disappointed in today's decision, which allows the government to conduct intrusive searches of Americans' laptops and other electronics at the border without any suspicion that those devices contain evidence of wrongdoing," ACLU attorney Catherine Crump said in a press release from the organization. Crump argued the case in 2011.

IDG News Service - U.S. Customs and Border Protection can search travelers' laptops and other electronic devices without a show of reasonable suspicion, according to a federal judge's dismissal of a 2010 lawsuit on Tuesday.

In its suit, the American Civil Liberties Union had argued that having border officials search the contents of a laptop violated the U.S Constitution unless the officials had a reasonable suspicion that the contents related to a crime. Judge Edward Korman of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn, disagreed and threw out the suit. The ACLU said an appeal is being considered.

"We're disappointed in today's decision, which allows the government to conduct intrusive searches of Americans' laptops and other electronics at the border without any suspicion that those devices contain evidence of wrongdoing," ACLU attorney Catherine Crump said in a press release from the organization. Crump argued the case in 2011.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed the suit on behalf of Pascal Abidor, a student with dual French and U.S. citizenship, and of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the National Press Photographers Association. In 2010, customs officials confiscated Abidor's laptop as he entered the country from Canada on a train trip from Montreal to New York. They searched the computer while detaining Abidor for several hours, then released him without charges.

Abidor, who said he was studying the modern history of Shiites in Lebanon, had downloaded photos of the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah on his computer. He let CBP conduct the search and provided his computer password. The government searched private material, including messages between Abidor and his girlfriend, and kept his data for further searches after giving back his laptop, the suit alleged.

Such searches are a particular concern for defense lawyers and journalists because they rely on the confidentiality of information to represent clients and to protect sources, the suit said.

In dismissing the suit, Judge Korman said CBP already has special procedures for those types of privileged content that require a show of suspicion. Border searches of electronic devices are rare, and many of them already are done with a show of reasonable suspicion, Judge Korman said.

"In sum, declaratory relief is not appropriate because it is unlikely that a member of the association plaintiffs will have his electronic device searched at the border, and it is far less likely that a forensic search would occur without reasonable suspicion," Korman wrote, according to a copy of the decision posted by the ACLU.

Though the suit had alleged 6,500 people's electronic devices were searched at U.S. borders between October 2008 and June 2010, that's out of 1.1 million people processed daily, according to CBP, the judge wrote. "Stated another way, there is less than a one in a million chance that a computer carried by an inbound international traveler will be detained," Korman wrote.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

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Science Podcast - Carbon cycle, collective sensing, Visualization Challenge, and more (1 Feb 2013)

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Customer Experience Challenge Met: Oracle

PG Note: Oracle is providing their take and this will close the series for now. Oracle is the one company that has aligned more than a product--in fact a complete product portfolio around their customer experience messaging. Today we have David Vap, group VP for Oracle Applications responding. I haven't dealt with David Vap before so this is the first time I'm "meeting" him too.

David, you have the floor. Let's see what you can bring.

__________________________________________________________________

Thank you for the opportunity to vet what CX means to Oracle, our customers, and it's relation to CRM. As an industry we are experiencing a "bandwagon" phenomenon. The danger of this is that the entire point of CX could be lost, transmuted, and confused. But on the flipside, if CX reaches buzzword status and gets overused, yet this leads to more organizations taking action and really thinking about what they should do to improve the overall customer experience, then I say let it happen.

It's glaringly apparent that the rate of recent technological change (social, mobile, cloud) has forever altered the ways that we consumers use technology. This reality greatly impacts how businesses must serve their customers. The new transparency this technology gives consumers is forcing businesses to truly consider the customer experience.  I agree that the concept of CX has been around for quite awhile, but I don't think that companies were truly forced to deal with it in the same way as they must deal with it due to today's empowered consumer.  (For an interesting read on the new consumer, check out Greg Gianforte's new book Attack of the Customer)  As vendors, it's our job to innovate, anticipating market shifts and to develop solutions that help our customers address these rapid changes.

It's also important to understand that a good customer experience is dependent upon far more than technology. Any business can implement new software, but without a cultural shift and leadership commitment inside a company, it won't create better experiences. But why? Because CX requires a holistic look at how a customer interacts with a company through the entire lifecycle, examining the people, processes, and technology that support and interact with the customer. Oracle is committed to partnering with our customers to tackle this challenge. This change requires a sense of organizational urgency and focus to understand the varied unique customer interaction journeys with the company. Only after the customer journeys are defined and a strategy is set, can technology be designed to create the desired experience.

While CX isn't just about technology, enabling great customer experiences at scale does require a wide range of software solutions. At Oracle we have been busy building a comprehensive portfolio of applications to meet this challenge. In fact, RightNow, which is one of Oracle's more recent acquisitions, has been a leading proponent of software driving excellent customer experience. Oracle is well known for leadership in the CRM category, which we view as a subset of the CX portfolio. We continue to broaden our portfolio of CX applications to meet market needs across marketing, sales, commerce, and service.

Let's set the stage to explain why CX is in such demand right now and is taking precedent. Technology and the proliferation of devices, data growth, and high-speed networks are reaching a zenith. Social has matured into the mainstream. In 2012, Pinterest had the largest year-over-year increase in audience and time spent of any social network.[i] In the U.S, people spent 27B minutes on Facebook and 3.6B minutes on Twitter.[ii] The last five years has changed long standing behaviors forever – the way we chat, share, shop, and influence. We are always on, always sharing, and always aware.

Additionally customers' rising expectations and competition have spawned greater commodization of products and experiences from rapid copycat development, as well as new markets opening up global competition with low-cost manufacturing and distribution. On top of it all, media saturation on both traditional and social channels has everyone fighting for attention in more places.

The way businesses often respond to these changes is to apply the old approaches that worked in the past, but are now seeing marginal returns. Core go-to tactics? Get into a price war. Increase marketing spend on traditional channels. Reduce operational and support costs. These approaches lack the agility, insight and differentiation needed. At Oracle, we're working with our customers to create a different approach. We're highlighting just how critical it is to build a great customer experience. Research we conducted and shared with our customers has borne this out. We found that 26% of consumers post negative comments to social sites after a bad experience. In addition, 86% of customers stop doing business with an organization after just one bad experience.[iii] These numbers cause people to sit up and take notice.

So where do we begin? We believe that understanding the complete customer lifecycle is crucial to developing an effective customer experience strategy. It's important for companies to appreciate their customers' unique journey. Organizations need to start by putting themselves into their customers' shoes. Companies must uncover the truth about what customers want, expect, and what matters most to them. At Oracle, we work closely with key leaders at many companies to rethink the customer experience from the outside in. We run full day customer journey mapping workshops where we focus on their customers, and how to create winning experiences for them. We spend an entire day bringing together both business and technology people focused solely on the experiences they want their customer to achieve. That's how it has to start.

We encourage companies to think about the customer lifecycle as a connected loop that moves through the stages outlined above. We know the model isn't perfect, but it allows people across business function silos to engage.  It's important to discover how to adapt their business to enable that journey, and then later to select and implement the best technology tools to provide the ultimate customer experience.

But we've found that one of the biggest hurdles for CX is not just the technology and the potentially complex implementations across channels and customer touchpoints. As discussed, the largest roadblock is the organization itself and the need to start embedding the customer experience at a cultural level. The "house divided against itself cannot stand" (Abraham Lincoln, June 17, 1858) rings true. For example, the VP of eCommerce cannot be in competition with the VP of Retail. There must be a new organizational harmony and a strategy in place for any CX initiative to succeed.

(Credit: Oracle)

Oracle's approach to CX has three core tenets: Understand, Empower, and Adapt.

First companies must UNDERSTAND their customer. But how? For some businesses it's difficult to harness the knowledge needed to understand how to better serve customers. Obviously technology can help fill the void.

At Oracle, we believe that in order to understand the customer, companies must take advantage of the data available about the customer and the business, both inside and outside of the company. This absolutely includes leveraging social data. To handle the expanding number of touchpoints, the volume and variety of customer information, organizations have to begin investigating business intelligence tools and analytics to offer more-targeted experiences.

Companies need to harvest the insight available about their businesses from this collective knowledge, which exists across all interaction channels, to better understand the business and customer needs, to improve overall operational efficiencies, and to deliver better experiences. One Oracle customer, a US-based consumer goods manufacturer, uses Oracle solutions to track conversations about its products on social channels and to listen and collect valuable feedback across the web. This helps the company maximize every opportunity to provide an exceptional customer experience. In addition, the technology enables the manufacturer to prioritize incidents and adjust accordingly, to provide customer service where it is needed most.

Secondly, organizations must EMPOWER customers and employees with consistent, accurate information that ultimately cultivates loyal relationships. We recommend managing this challenge by making self-service experiences easy and rewarding. Another Oracle customer, a large global travel company, is a great example of a company doing just this. We all know how unpredictable, and sometimes frustrating, travel can be. To ensure a seamless customer experience, this company provides customers with up-to-the-minute information, and Oracle's contact center solution provides the means, enabling superior multi-channel support regardless of how customers communicate with the company--via phone, email, or web. The solution dynamically changes based on the actions taken by the agent and on information known about the customer and product. The workspace delivers instant access to relevant content, at the right time and place. Agents are confident that they are always providing the most accurate information to the customer, which increases agent productivity and helps drive customer satisfaction.

And of course, empowering frontline employees with real-time, valuable insight anytime, anywhere enables them to more effectively engage, recognize, and reward customers in the context of interactions.

Thirdly, companies must continuously ADAPT to this ever changing market. We believe that the cloud can help, but how? By helping organizations adapt to fluctuations in demand with built in capabilities such as elastic scalability, robust redundancy, and extensible integrations. These provide more time to innovate for the needs of the business.

For one company, a US based tax preparation firm, the flexibility that a cloud-based customer experience solution provides, enables them to scale up operations during the critical and extremely busy tax season. As one might expect, getting workers up to speed quickly can be tricky, but is essential. This is especially true when a large portion of the support team is seasonal. Regardless, this information flow must happen seamlessly, so that the customer experience doesn't suffer. With the ability to scale its operations appropriately, this firm was able to increase productivity while simultaneously providing a best-in-class experience for its customers.

Certainly with increasing demand and more channel choices, businesses are now required to streamline cross-channel interactions and easily transition between transactions, conversations, knowledge, and people. A tall order indeed. Not to mention that increasing choices means increased competition and customer expectations. This requires that companies deliver highly personalized experiences based on deep customer insight, including the customer's own preferences and style. And to also continuously optimize and adapt these experiences in real-time based on insight gained from their intent, context, and behaviors.

As discussed, customer experience is more than just CRM, but does encompass CRM. A good customer experience strategy creates the consistent, connected, personalized experiences that customers want, by transforming existing operational systems and infrastructure into a differentiated experience across the customer lifecycle.

It's important to recognize that a comprehensive CX strategy needs to support a broad set of technology:

Marketing. To manage the entire marketing cycle from planning and budgeting to execution and analysis; create personalized and contextually relevant experiences across Web, mobile, and social channels; and manage and integrate multichannel loyalty programs

Commerce. To providepersonalized customer engagement across touchpoints, connecting buyers with relevant products and services, providing consistent buying experiences

Sales. Tocreate and optimize sales plans, territories, incentives, and quotas; centralize customer information; notify sales users of any activity impacting their customers and deals; allow sales users to collaborate online; integrate key competitor and reference information; and manage lead scoring and distribution

Service and support. To unify service interactions across touch points and channels; get an accurate, current record of customers; reduce the time it takes to resolve customer issues; personalize responses to customer inquiries; and enable service both in the call center and in the field

Social. To listen and engage with customers across social media platforms; monitor, understand, and respond to consumers' social conversations; create, publish, moderate, and measure social marketing campaigns and engagement; integrate social interactions with customer service; and collaborate and build engaging applications and enriched social experiences across Facebook, social sites, and mobile phones and tablets

Data Management. To leverage customer data to deliver great customer experiences; create a single source of customer information; scale relevant content, search results, and merchandising across customer paths; and use rules and predictive analytics to make better decisions faster.

(Credit: Oracle)

Truth be told, Oracle is the only customer experience vendor that can claim it has every capability mentioned above available within a comprehensive customer experience portfolio offering. We believe that these tools address the customer experience challenge that companies live every day, by actually providing solutions to meet the imperative. More than just lip service, but actual working solutions. More than just branding or messaging, but real technology capabilities in use today.

Oracle is meeting the customer experience challenge every day, by giving our customers the knowledge, resources, and tools to identify their unique customer experience challenges and by helping to develop strategies to address those pain points. The real challenge for us is, and will remain, in helping our customers to achieve success with theirs.

[i] According to STATE OF THE MEDIA: THE SOCIAL MEDIA REPORT 2012 by Nielsen

[ii] According to STATE OF THE MEDIA: THE SOCIAL MEDIA REPORT 2012 by Nielsen

[iii] According to The 2011 U.S. Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report by RightNow (acquired by Oracle in March 2012)

View the original article here

Customer Experience Challenge Met: Oracle

PG Note: Oracle is providing their take and this will close the series for now. Oracle is the one company that has aligned more than a product--in fact a complete product portfolio around their customer experience messaging. Today we have David Vap, group VP for Oracle Applications responding. I haven't dealt with David Vap before so this is the first time I'm "meeting" him too.

David, you have the floor. Let's see what you can bring.

__________________________________________________________________

Thank you for the opportunity to vet what CX means to Oracle, our customers, and it's relation to CRM. As an industry we are experiencing a "bandwagon" phenomenon. The danger of this is that the entire point of CX could be lost, transmuted, and confused. But on the flipside, if CX reaches buzzword status and gets overused, yet this leads to more organizations taking action and really thinking about what they should do to improve the overall customer experience, then I say let it happen.

It's glaringly apparent that the rate of recent technological change (social, mobile, cloud) has forever altered the ways that we consumers use technology. This reality greatly impacts how businesses must serve their customers. The new transparency this technology gives consumers is forcing businesses to truly consider the customer experience.  I agree that the concept of CX has been around for quite awhile, but I don't think that companies were truly forced to deal with it in the same way as they must deal with it due to today's empowered consumer.  (For an interesting read on the new consumer, check out Greg Gianforte's new book Attack of the Customer)  As vendors, it's our job to innovate, anticipating market shifts and to develop solutions that help our customers address these rapid changes.

It's also important to understand that a good customer experience is dependent upon far more than technology. Any business can implement new software, but without a cultural shift and leadership commitment inside a company, it won't create better experiences. But why? Because CX requires a holistic look at how a customer interacts with a company through the entire lifecycle, examining the people, processes, and technology that support and interact with the customer. Oracle is committed to partnering with our customers to tackle this challenge. This change requires a sense of organizational urgency and focus to understand the varied unique customer interaction journeys with the company. Only after the customer journeys are defined and a strategy is set, can technology be designed to create the desired experience.

While CX isn't just about technology, enabling great customer experiences at scale does require a wide range of software solutions. At Oracle we have been busy building a comprehensive portfolio of applications to meet this challenge. In fact, RightNow, which is one of Oracle's more recent acquisitions, has been a leading proponent of software driving excellent customer experience. Oracle is well known for leadership in the CRM category, which we view as a subset of the CX portfolio. We continue to broaden our portfolio of CX applications to meet market needs across marketing, sales, commerce, and service.

Let's set the stage to explain why CX is in such demand right now and is taking precedent. Technology and the proliferation of devices, data growth, and high-speed networks are reaching a zenith. Social has matured into the mainstream. In 2012, Pinterest had the largest year-over-year increase in audience and time spent of any social network.[i] In the U.S, people spent 27B minutes on Facebook and 3.6B minutes on Twitter.[ii] The last five years has changed long standing behaviors forever – the way we chat, share, shop, and influence. We are always on, always sharing, and always aware.

Additionally customers' rising expectations and competition have spawned greater commodization of products and experiences from rapid copycat development, as well as new markets opening up global competition with low-cost manufacturing and distribution. On top of it all, media saturation on both traditional and social channels has everyone fighting for attention in more places.

The way businesses often respond to these changes is to apply the old approaches that worked in the past, but are now seeing marginal returns. Core go-to tactics? Get into a price war. Increase marketing spend on traditional channels. Reduce operational and support costs. These approaches lack the agility, insight and differentiation needed. At Oracle, we're working with our customers to create a different approach. We're highlighting just how critical it is to build a great customer experience. Research we conducted and shared with our customers has borne this out. We found that 26% of consumers post negative comments to social sites after a bad experience. In addition, 86% of customers stop doing business with an organization after just one bad experience.[iii] These numbers cause people to sit up and take notice.

So where do we begin? We believe that understanding the complete customer lifecycle is crucial to developing an effective customer experience strategy. It's important for companies to appreciate their customers' unique journey. Organizations need to start by putting themselves into their customers' shoes. Companies must uncover the truth about what customers want, expect, and what matters most to them. At Oracle, we work closely with key leaders at many companies to rethink the customer experience from the outside in. We run full day customer journey mapping workshops where we focus on their customers, and how to create winning experiences for them. We spend an entire day bringing together both business and technology people focused solely on the experiences they want their customer to achieve. That's how it has to start.

We encourage companies to think about the customer lifecycle as a connected loop that moves through the stages outlined above. We know the model isn't perfect, but it allows people across business function silos to engage.  It's important to discover how to adapt their business to enable that journey, and then later to select and implement the best technology tools to provide the ultimate customer experience.

But we've found that one of the biggest hurdles for CX is not just the technology and the potentially complex implementations across channels and customer touchpoints. As discussed, the largest roadblock is the organization itself and the need to start embedding the customer experience at a cultural level. The "house divided against itself cannot stand" (Abraham Lincoln, June 17, 1858) rings true. For example, the VP of eCommerce cannot be in competition with the VP of Retail. There must be a new organizational harmony and a strategy in place for any CX initiative to succeed.

(Credit: Oracle)

Oracle's approach to CX has three core tenets: Understand, Empower, and Adapt.

First companies must UNDERSTAND their customer. But how? For some businesses it's difficult to harness the knowledge needed to understand how to better serve customers. Obviously technology can help fill the void.

At Oracle, we believe that in order to understand the customer, companies must take advantage of the data available about the customer and the business, both inside and outside of the company. This absolutely includes leveraging social data. To handle the expanding number of touchpoints, the volume and variety of customer information, organizations have to begin investigating business intelligence tools and analytics to offer more-targeted experiences.

Companies need to harvest the insight available about their businesses from this collective knowledge, which exists across all interaction channels, to better understand the business and customer needs, to improve overall operational efficiencies, and to deliver better experiences. One Oracle customer, a US-based consumer goods manufacturer, uses Oracle solutions to track conversations about its products on social channels and to listen and collect valuable feedback across the web. This helps the company maximize every opportunity to provide an exceptional customer experience. In addition, the technology enables the manufacturer to prioritize incidents and adjust accordingly, to provide customer service where it is needed most.

Secondly, organizations must EMPOWER customers and employees with consistent, accurate information that ultimately cultivates loyal relationships. We recommend managing this challenge by making self-service experiences easy and rewarding. Another Oracle customer, a large global travel company, is a great example of a company doing just this. We all know how unpredictable, and sometimes frustrating, travel can be. To ensure a seamless customer experience, this company provides customers with up-to-the-minute information, and Oracle's contact center solution provides the means, enabling superior multi-channel support regardless of how customers communicate with the company--via phone, email, or web. The solution dynamically changes based on the actions taken by the agent and on information known about the customer and product. The workspace delivers instant access to relevant content, at the right time and place. Agents are confident that they are always providing the most accurate information to the customer, which increases agent productivity and helps drive customer satisfaction.

And of course, empowering frontline employees with real-time, valuable insight anytime, anywhere enables them to more effectively engage, recognize, and reward customers in the context of interactions.

Thirdly, companies must continuously ADAPT to this ever changing market. We believe that the cloud can help, but how? By helping organizations adapt to fluctuations in demand with built in capabilities such as elastic scalability, robust redundancy, and extensible integrations. These provide more time to innovate for the needs of the business.

For one company, a US based tax preparation firm, the flexibility that a cloud-based customer experience solution provides, enables them to scale up operations during the critical and extremely busy tax season. As one might expect, getting workers up to speed quickly can be tricky, but is essential. This is especially true when a large portion of the support team is seasonal. Regardless, this information flow must happen seamlessly, so that the customer experience doesn't suffer. With the ability to scale its operations appropriately, this firm was able to increase productivity while simultaneously providing a best-in-class experience for its customers.

Certainly with increasing demand and more channel choices, businesses are now required to streamline cross-channel interactions and easily transition between transactions, conversations, knowledge, and people. A tall order indeed. Not to mention that increasing choices means increased competition and customer expectations. This requires that companies deliver highly personalized experiences based on deep customer insight, including the customer's own preferences and style. And to also continuously optimize and adapt these experiences in real-time based on insight gained from their intent, context, and behaviors.

As discussed, customer experience is more than just CRM, but does encompass CRM. A good customer experience strategy creates the consistent, connected, personalized experiences that customers want, by transforming existing operational systems and infrastructure into a differentiated experience across the customer lifecycle.

It's important to recognize that a comprehensive CX strategy needs to support a broad set of technology:

Marketing. To manage the entire marketing cycle from planning and budgeting to execution and analysis; create personalized and contextually relevant experiences across Web, mobile, and social channels; and manage and integrate multichannel loyalty programs

Commerce. To providepersonalized customer engagement across touchpoints, connecting buyers with relevant products and services, providing consistent buying experiences

Sales. Tocreate and optimize sales plans, territories, incentives, and quotas; centralize customer information; notify sales users of any activity impacting their customers and deals; allow sales users to collaborate online; integrate key competitor and reference information; and manage lead scoring and distribution

Service and support. To unify service interactions across touch points and channels; get an accurate, current record of customers; reduce the time it takes to resolve customer issues; personalize responses to customer inquiries; and enable service both in the call center and in the field

Social. To listen and engage with customers across social media platforms; monitor, understand, and respond to consumers' social conversations; create, publish, moderate, and measure social marketing campaigns and engagement; integrate social interactions with customer service; and collaborate and build engaging applications and enriched social experiences across Facebook, social sites, and mobile phones and tablets

Data Management. To leverage customer data to deliver great customer experiences; create a single source of customer information; scale relevant content, search results, and merchandising across customer paths; and use rules and predictive analytics to make better decisions faster.

(Credit: Oracle)

Truth be told, Oracle is the only customer experience vendor that can claim it has every capability mentioned above available within a comprehensive customer experience portfolio offering. We believe that these tools address the customer experience challenge that companies live every day, by actually providing solutions to meet the imperative. More than just lip service, but actual working solutions. More than just branding or messaging, but real technology capabilities in use today.

Oracle is meeting the customer experience challenge every day, by giving our customers the knowledge, resources, and tools to identify their unique customer experience challenges and by helping to develop strategies to address those pain points. The real challenge for us is, and will remain, in helping our customers to achieve success with theirs.

[i] According to STATE OF THE MEDIA: THE SOCIAL MEDIA REPORT 2012 by Nielsen

[ii] According to STATE OF THE MEDIA: THE SOCIAL MEDIA REPORT 2012 by Nielsen

[iii] According to The 2011 U.S. Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report by RightNow (acquired by Oracle in March 2012)

View the original article here

Caltech Space Challenge

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If you're a student who's ever wanted to plan a manned space mission—or channel your inner Bruce Willis from the movie Armageddon—now's your chance. This September, Caltech will a host a workshop inviting about 20 graduate and undergraduate students from around the world to design a mission to an asteroid or comet in Earth's neighborhood—a so-called Near-Earth Object (NEO)—that would return a sample of rock or ice. The Caltech Space Challenge, sponsored by the Keck Institute for Space Studies, will pit two groups against each other to plan the best mission.

"Designing a human-exploration mission to a near-Earth asteroid is both timely and exciting," says Donald Yeomans, who manages NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL and is one of the faculty mentors for the workshop. "The most spacecraft-accessible asteroids in Earth's neighborhood are also the most dangerous in terms of their ability to collide with Earth."

Experts from Caltech and JPL will give talks and mentor the students, providing them with the basic knowledge to plan a space mission. The two teams will then put their heads together and come up with a target and trajectory, a spacecraft design, experiments and instruments, and everything else needed for a mission. The workshop will look for students from a variety of fields—chemists, mechanical engineers, software engineers, and, for a manned mission, even someone with a medical background, says Prakhar Mehrotra, one of the graduate students leading the project.

Mehrotra says he came up with the idea after taking part in a similar program with the European Space Agency in 2009. In that program, called the Space Station Design Workshop, participants had to design a mission to the moon. The experience was so rewarding that he wanted to do something similar at Caltech, taking advantage of the resources at JPL to receive practical training in engineering and research.

In 2010, President Obama announced his goal to land an astronaut on an asteroid by 2025. So this year, Mehrotra teamed up with Jon Mihaly, a graduate student in aerospace engineering, to organize a workshop that challenges students to plan a mission that does just that.

In addition to developing possible techniques to divert a future, life-threatening asteroid impact, Yeomans says, an asteroid mission will help scientists learn more about the origins of the solar system and life on Earth. NEOs were left over from the processes that formed the solar system, and they likely brought with them water and organic compounds that are crucial for life when they slammed into Earth early in the planet's history. These kinds of impacts played a critical role in shaping the evolution of life. One such collision might have led to the demise of the dinosaurs, for example.

After the workshop, scientists and engineers from JPL will cull the ideas and apply them toward the design of an asteroid mission, Mehorotra says. Participants might be able to parlay their experiences into research internships at JPL.

"I really think it's important to get people interested in this field," adds Mihaly. With an aging NASA, it's crucial to train the mission planners of the future.

The Caltech Space Challenge will take place from September 12 to 16. To apply or to learn more, click here. Applications are due July 8.

View the original article here