B612 Foundation applauds NASA’s recent announcement of the formation of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. NASA's new planetary defense coordination office has a critical role not only in coordination but importantly in funding projects for asteroid detection and deflection. There are an estimated one million...
Sponsored Research Agreements While making grants or financially sponsoring research agreements to academic institutions or to non-B612 staff researchers is not part of our regular organizational practice, it does happen on occasion and those partnerships are generally referred to as a Sponsored Research Agreement (SRA). Indirect Costs In...
Asteroid Day Expert Panelist, B612 Chair Emeritus and Apollo 9 Astronaut Rusty Schweickart at the California Academy of Sciences on June 30, 2015. Photo by Donald Kinney. Rusty Schweickart, in conversation with B612 Foundation COO Danica Remy, talks about the recent Asteroid Day events around the...
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...
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...
By Dr. Marc Buie, Sentinel Mission Scientist It may not be completely obvious but flying a successful space mission takes a lot of work. Space is a hostile and difficult to access region. A spacecraft must be carefully designed to do the work desired and then...
[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...
Forget Armageddon, says Ed Lu. Forget sci-fi space shuttles. Forget burying nuclear bombs in comets. Forget all that. Asteroids are a real and potentially existential threat. But if we find them early enough, they’re fairly easy to deflect. With years or decades, instead of months...