B612 Press Conference at the Seattle Museum of Flight
April 24, 2014
Asteroids can and do strike Earth.
In a special Earth Day program on April 22, Seattle’s Museum of Flight hosted three prominent US Astronauts supporting the B612 Foundation for a press conference which unveiled a new video showing the surprising number of asteroid impacts on Earth during the last decade, and the even more surprising fact that we can prevent future asteroid impacts.
“The visualization shows data from the nuclear weapons test warning network supplied by Peter Brown, Western University of Canada. This network has detected 26 multi-kiloton explosions since 2001, all of which are due to asteroid impacts. This shows that asteroid impacts are NOT rare — but actually 3-10 times more common than we previously thought.” stated Dr. Ed Lu, CEO and co-founder of the B612 Foundation.
“The fact that none of these asteroid impacts shown in the video was detected in advance shows that the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a “city-killer” sized asteroid is blind luck. The goal of the B612 Sentinel Mission is to find and track asteroids decades before they hit Earth, allowing us to easily deflect them.”
The B612 Foundation is partnered with Ball Aerospace to build the Sentinel Infrared Space Telescope Mission. From a Venus-like orbit around the Sun, Sentinel will be the most capable system for finding and tracking asteroids ever built.
During the Press Conference, Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders unveiled a new mural that highlights the importance of the Sentinel Mission. His EARTHRISE photo shows the Earth rising above the crater-strewn surface of the Moon, and will remain on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight. “We began Apollo 8 thinking we were going to learn about the Moon, instead, we began a new understanding of our Earth.” The EARTHRISE photo will serve as the backdrop for the morning Press Conference.
Tom Jones, four-time US Shuttle Astronaut and President of the Association of Space Explorers, explained the recent UN resolution calling for international cooperation for detection of dangerous asteroids.
