Donald Yeomans

One of the most important uses of technology might be to find an incoming asteroid and deflect it, lest humanity perish and this whole list become irrelevant. The last major mass extinction occurred 65 million years ago when an asteroid collided with earth, killing off the dinosaurs. To help ensure that our own species isn’t eradicated by a similar event, NASA created the Near Earth Object Program Office, headed by Donald Yeomans, to keep track of every space object that has even a remote chance of striking earth. Yeomans is also a co-investigator of the agency’s Deep Impact Mission, designed to slame a probe into Comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005. Yeomans often serves as the soothing voice to calm fears of asteroid impacts when large rocks are found and appear to be headed our way.