Andy Cheng

Andy Cheng is chief scientist for planetary defense at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, and a lead investigator for NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the first mission to demonstrate asteroid deflection by a kinetic impactor. He previously served as deputy chief scientist for space science in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, at NASA Headquarters, from 2007 to 2008. He was the project scientist of NASA’s NEAR mission, which was the first mission to orbit and land on an asteroid in 2001. He was the Orbital LIDAR scientist on the Joint Science Team for the Japanese Hayabusa mission to asteroid Itokawa in 2005. He was an interdisciplinary scientist on the NASA Galileo mission to Jupiter from 1995-2003 and a co-investigator from 2003 on the NASA Cassini mission to Saturn. He was the principal investigator for the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on the NASA New Horizons mission which visited Pluto in 2015 and the Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth in 2019. He joined APL in 1983, and founded the Planetary Exploration Group there in 2004. He obtained his undergraduate degree in physics in 1971 from Princeton University, and his Ph. D. in physics from Columbia University in 1977.