Asteroid Institute Mission Director Harold Reitsema recently presented at the National Academies of Science on the work that B612 has done on space-based asteroid observation missions. The National Academies of Sciences has been tasked to explore the capabilities of space-based telescopes, including exploring the relative advantages...
In December 2004, astronomers in Arizona discovered an asteroid the size of a cruise ship that appeared to be on a collision course with Earth. Initial observations of the space rock, known as Apophis, suggested that it had a very good chance of striking our...
Ed Lu is an explorer whose quest is to map the unknown—whether by surveying the oceans at Liquid Robotics, leading Google Advanced Projects Team to map our neighborhoods, or his current work unveiling the secrets of the inner solar system with the Sentinel Mission. Ed...
John Troeltzsch is the Kepler mission program manager for Ball Aerospace. He received his Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado in 1983 and was immediately hired by Ball Aerospace. While working at Ball, he continued his studies at C.U. and...
Today marks the three-year anniversary of the Chelyabinsk asteroid airburst. You probably recall watching the dash cam video footage of the fireball exploding over the city. The asteroid was only 17-20 meters in diameter. For reference, the asteroid that flattened 2,000 sq km of forest...
We have good news to report. The field of Planetary Defense has taken a step forward with the announcement of the formation of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) within NASA. This new office was created in response to the highly critical report by the...
2015 saw tremendous advances in B612's education, advocacy, science and technology efforts. This year, our Sentinel technical team discovered new optimizations of Sentinel's capabilities (see Lunar Planetary Conference), and we continue to believe that Sentinel is the best technical solution to the asteroid discovery problem. We...
The aim of Asteroid Day is to inform the public and raise awareness about the possibility that asteroids can collide with the Earth in the future. Today was chosen to highlight the risk because on the same day in 1908, a 30m object entered 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...
The Sentinel orbit is a long way from Earth, so it won’t observe the same objects that ground-based telescopes are looking at. But it will find objects that are a large distance from Earth. The Nominal Sentinel Orbit is the Sentinel orbit, which is at the...