Bill Bottke
William Bottke is the assistant director of the Department for Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Bottke is also the director of the Center for Lunar Origin and Evolution of NASA’s Lunar Science Institute. He was a postdoctoral fellow at both Caltech and Cornell University and was a member of the Science Definition Team that prepared a seminal 2003 report on detection of hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs). Bottke’s expertise related to NEOs involves their delivery from their source regions in various asteroid and cometary populations to their observed orbits.
Bottke’s research interests include the collisional and dynamical evolution of small body populations throughout the solar system (e.g., asteroids, comets, irregular satellites, Kuiper belt objects, meteoroids, dust) and the formation and bombardment history of planetesimals, planets and satellites
He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics and astrophysics from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in planetary science from the University of Arizona.
Related Resources by Bill Bottke from the Natural Hazards Library
Irregular Satellites: The Most Collisionally Evolved Populations in the Solar System
With David Nesvorny, David Vokrouhlicky, and Alessandro Morbidelli, The Astronomical Journal, Volume 139, 2010
Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies
Final Report
with the Committee to Review Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies, 2010