It is a cold January afternoon on the peak of Mt. Bigelow, an hour's drive north from Tucson, and the wind burns my face as I watch the colors of the desert sunset bleed into the foothills of the Catalina mountains. This is the home of...
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...
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,...
[caption id="attachment_620" align="alignnone" width="705"] Image: Dan Durda/Sentinel Mission[/caption] Lord Martin Rees, UK Astronomer Royal, says it’s time to ramp up efforts to find the many smaller near-Earth objects that could unleash destruction on our planet and identifies the work of Dr. Ed Lu and the Sentinel...
[vc_column_text width="1/1" el_position="first last"] Between 2000 and 2013, a network of sensors that monitors Earth around the clock listening for the infrasound signature of nuclear detonations detected 26 explosions on Earth ranging in energy from 1-600 kilotons – all caused not by nuclear explosions, but rather...
It's only a matter of time before a big comet or asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. Will scientists discover it, and be able to do something about it, ahead of time? Ed Lu is interviewed by PBS' News Hour....
The goal of the B612 Foundation is to protect the Earth from Asteroid impacts. We remain strongly committed to achieving this goal. Asteroids like the one that struck in Tunguska in 1908 (45 meters) are large enough to cause enormous damage and loss of life. We have...
If you've ever stopped to peer with suspicion at the sky, wondering how that would go, a mammoth piece of space rock on its way in to bring ruin, the last two years have not been especially restful. In February 2013, a large asteroid ripped...