Clark Chapman is a planetary scientist whose research has specialized in studies of asteroids and cratering of planetary surfaces, using telescopes, spacecraft, and computers. He is a past Chair of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society and was the first editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. He is a winner of the DPS’s Carl Sagan Award for Excellence in Public Communication in Planetary Sciences. Clark has been on the science teams of the Galileo, Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR-Shoemaker), and MESSENGER missions.

Clark has undergraduate, Master’s, and PhD degrees from Harvard (astronomy), M.I.T. (meteorology), and M.I.T. (planetary science), respectively. For many years he was at the Planetary Science Institute (SAIC) in Tucson and has been at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder since 1996.

We sat down with Clark during our Asteroid Day 2015 event in San Francisco to talk about planetary defence and the difference between asteroids and comets.

Watch part 1 and 2 of our interview below:

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Asteroid Day, June 30th 2015
California Academy of Sciences
San Francisco, California