With less than one week to go before the first official Asteroid Day on June 30, local organizers are making final preparations for more than 50 public events worldwide to increase education and awareness about asteroids and how to better detect them. June 30 is...
The world's first Asteroid Day will be held on 30 June in a bid to raise awareness about future impact events and the threat they pose to the planet. Asteroid Day was announced in December 2014, when a global coalition of scientists, astronauts, physicists and celebrities...
It would be the end of the world as we know it. A relatively small lump of rock – a small asteroid, perhaps only a few hundred metres across – plunging to Earth would devastate a continent or trigger tsunamis. Civilisation would be set back...
B612 Foundation is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to planetary defense from asteroids. Founded in 2002, in our first decade, we worked to find technical solutions for asteroid deflection, assuming the necessary first step of discovering and tracking threatening asteroids would be managed by the...
At the Planetary Defense Conference of 2015, Newsweek investigated whether impacts from dangerous asteroids can be stopped and who was going to pay. One of the Americans who has played a central role in the development of planetary defense is B612 co-founder Rusty Schweickart. Read the Article: "We...
WASHINGTON — A privately funded space telescope originally proposed to search for larger near-Earth asteroids may also be effective in detecting smaller, but more numerous and potentially more dangerous, such objects. In a presentation at the International Academy of Astronautics’ Planetary Defense Conference in Frascati, Italy,...
Humankind lives in a cosmic shooting gallery. For evidence of that, we need look no further than the events of 15 February 2013. On that day, a medium-size asteroid was set to pass some 28,000 kilometers from Earth, unusually close and well within the orbits...
After the devastation wreaked by the Chelyabinsk asteroid airburst on 15th February 2013, two questions were on everybody’s lips. One, “why didn’t we see it coming?” And two, “How can we prevent similar events in the future?” Read the Article: "How to prevent another Chelyabinsk" Astronomy Now (April 29,...
We interviewed filmmaker Grig Richters for our September 2014 newsletter on his upcoming asteroid film, 51 Degrees North. The film’s story centers on a filmmaker who captures the last moments of life on Earth before it collides with an asteroid. Since our interview with Grig...
Steve Jurvetson's Biography Bio: Steve Jurvetson is a Partner at DFJ. The SF Chronicle and SF Examiner recognized Steve as one of “ten people expected to have the greatest impact on the Bay Area in the early part of the 21st Century.” Steve was chosen by...