Since then, Gutierrez, a satellite systems engineer, has made it his mission to catalog every stairway in the Greater Los Angeles area, including those near his home in Long Beach.

"Coronagraphs tell us about how a CME is developing near the surface, and then we'll also have a heliospheric imager which will track the CME as it moves through space towards Earth, giving us a much better idea of how long it will take to arrive," explained Dr Michelle Sprake, the Airbus lead systems engineer on Vigil.

“This problem is fairly complicated,” says Fengqi You, a systems engineer at Cornell University and co-author of the paper.

“What we’re worried about is protecting the asteroid sample from Earth contamination,” says Anjani Polit, OSIRIS-REx’s mission implementation systems engineer at the University of Arizona.

Challenging him are Todd Curtis, a risk assessment professional and systems engineer, and Jesse Tam, a former banker and current board director for the Greater Seattle Chinese Chamber of Commerce.