Dr. Ed Cloutis

Dr. Ed Cloutis is busy getting ready to grab and return a piece of an asteroid to Earth. Cloutis is part of a Canadian Space Agency-NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx. The overall goal of the mission is to go into orbit around a near-Earth asteroid (called 1999 RQ36), touch down on it and bring back to Earth up to 2 kilograms of material from its surface. Cloutis, a Geography Professor and Director of the Centre for Forest Interdisciplinary Research at UWinnipeg, is one of the Canadian members of the science team for the mission, which will launch in 2016 and return the asteroid sample to earth in 2023.