Leaders of the nonprofit B612 Foundation today took the wraps off a campaign to fund and launch a space telescope to hunt for potential killer asteroids — a campaign they portrayed as a cosmic civic improvement project. Former NASA astronaut Ed Lu, the foundation's chairman and CEO, estimated that...
San Francisco, CA, June 28, 2012 In a press conference at the California Academy of Sciences Thursday morning, the B612 Foundation unveiled its plans to build, launch, and operate the first privately funded deep space mission – SENTINEL – a space telescope to be placed in...
How the Sentinel (Asteroid Hunter) Mission will be the perfect storm in the first private deep space mission.There's no doubt about it that a properly designed, space-based observatory could rapidly find most of the near-Earth objects that could represent a potential threat to the Earth." Read...
To combat a space-based threat, try a space-based solution. Non-profit B612 Foundation steps up to fill the killer-asteroid monitoring gap. Read the Article: "Non-Profit Steps Up to Fill Killer-Asteroid Monitoring Gap" WIRED (June 28, 2012) ...
Today, former B612 co-founder Dr. Ed Lu and fellow former NASA astronaut Dr. Stanley Love published a proposal for the Gravity Tractor method for altering an asteroid’s trajectory in Nature Vol. 438. Their method describes how a spacecraft could use its own gravitational pull to...
Testimony to Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space on the subject of Planetary Defense by B612 leaders....
To prevent an asteroid from hitting Earth, a space tug equipped with plasma engines could give it a push. B612 co-founders discuss the asteroid deflection method of a “space tug” or the gravity tractor in this Scientific American article. Rather than giving an asteroid a brief,...