Astronauts to reveal sobering data on large asteroid impacts

The Sentinel Space Telescope in orbit around the Sun. 

Credit: Ball Aerospace.

This Earth Day, Tuesday, April 22, three former NASA astronauts will present new evidence that our planet has experienced many more large-scale asteroid impacts over the past decade than previously thought; three to ten times more, in fact.

A new visualization of data from a nuclear weapons warning network, to be unveiled by B612 Foundation CEO Ed Lu during the evening event at Seattle's Museum of Flight, shows that "the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a 'city-killer' sized asteroid is blind luck."


Since 2001, 26 atomic-bomb-scale explosions have occurred in remote locations around the world, far from populated areas, made evident by a nuclear weapons test warning network.

In a recent press release B612 Foundation CEO Ed Lu states:

"This network has detected 26 multi-kiloton explosions since 2001, all of which are due to asteroid impacts. It shows that asteroid impacts are NOT rare, but actually 3-10 times more common than we previously thought."

"The fact that none of these asteroid impacts shown in the video was detected in advance is proof that the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a 'city-killer' sized asteroid is blind luck." 

"The goal of the B612 Sentinel mission is to find and track asteroids decades before they hit Earth, allowing us to easily deflect them."

The B612 Foundation is partnered with Ball Aerospace to build the Sentinel Space Telescope Mission.

Once positioned in solar orbit closer to the Sun from Earth, Sentinel will look outwards in infrared to detect hundreds of thousands of as-yet unknown near-Earth objects over 140 meters in size.

The privately-funded spacecraft is slated to launch in 2017-18 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

In addition to Lu, Space Shuttle astronaut Tom Jones and Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders will be speaking at the event, titled "Saving the Earth by Keeping Big Asteroids Away"

The event will be held at 6 p.m. PDT at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, WA.

It is free to the public and the visualization will be made available online on the B612 Foundation website.

Americanised Ariane 5: Game-changing Scenarios Rocket Execs

Commercial launch service providers on March 11 raised the possibility of Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket becoming American, the international Sea Launch becoming Russian and the high-cost Japanese H-2A rocket becoming cost competitive.

All three scenarios would mean radical changes for the current systems and address problems that each of them has in maintaining or establishing a position in a market characterized by no more than 20-25 geostationary-orbiting commercial telecommunications satellites being competed for launch in a given year.

The most surprising of the declarations came from Arianespace Chief Executive Stephane Israel, whose Evry, France-based company sees an opening to the now out-of-reach U.S. government market in the U.S. Air Force deliberation over whether U.S. government space system managers should seek a diversity of launch options.

SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket is bidding to launch military satellites and is on a path toward U.S. Air Force certification.

Israel, whose high-cost Ariane 5 industrial supply chain is already preparing for a Big Bang-type reorganization as it prepares for the next-generation Ariane 6 vehicle, would be obliged to share its work with U.S. contractors if Ariane 5 were to be eligible to launch U.S. government payloads.

“As far as the employment aspect, we are ready to see how we could Americanize our rocket in return for U.S. government business,” Israel said, adding that U.S. rockets occasionally launch European government satellites.

Members of the 20-nation European Space Agency (ESA) are encouraged to use the heavy-lift EADS Astrium Ariane 5, the medium-lift Europeanized Russian Soyuz and the light Ariane Vega rockets for all their government missions. With few exceptions, most do this.

The most recent example of an exception is the German government’s second-generation radar reconnaissance satellite system, SARah-2.

The two SARah-2 and -3, satellites are scheduled for launch on two SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets.

But the launch contract is not with the German government, but with OHB AG of Bremen, Germany, which is the SARah prime contractor and was given leeway in determining who would conduct the launches.

The first-generation constellation, the five-satellite SAR-Lupe system, was launched aboard Cosmos-3M Russian vehicles.

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Lasercomm on International Space station to beam video via laser back to Earth

An artist's rendering shows the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS). 

Credit: OPALS

What's more interesting than videos of cats chasing laser beams over the kitchen floor?

How about videos sent over laser beams from NASA's International Space Station back to Earth?

A team of about 20 working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., through the lab's Phaeton early-career-hire program, led the development of the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS) investigation, which is preparing for a March 16 launch to the International Space Station aboard the SpaceX-3 mission.

The goal is to provide NASA's first optical communication experiment on the orbital laboratory.

Scientific instruments used in space missions increasingly require higher communication rates to transmit gathered data back to Earth or to support high-data-rate applications, like high-definition video streams.

Matt Abrahamson

"Optical communications has the potential to be a game-changer," said mission manager Matt Abrahamson.

"Right now, many of our deep space missions communicate at 200 to 400 kilobits per second."

OPALS will demonstrate up to 50 megabits per second and future deep space optical communication systems will provide over one gigabits per second from Mars.

The Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS) instrument is hoisted onto a shipping pallet for transfer to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

From there it will launch to the International Space Station. 

Credit: NASA

"It's like upgrading from dial-up to DSL," added project systems engineer Bogdan Oaida.

Bogdan Oaida

"Our ability to generate data has greatly outpaced our ability to downlink it. Imagine trying to download a movie at home over dial-up."

"It's essentially the same problem in space, whether we're talking about low-Earth orbit or deep space."

OPALS is scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, part of a cargo resupply mission to the space station. The payload will be inside the Dragon cargo spacecraft.

Once deployed, OPALS will be conducting transmission tests for a period of nearly three months, with the possibility of a longer mission.

After the Dragon capsule docks with the station, OPALS will be robotically extracted from the trunk of the Dragon, and then manipulated by a robotic arm for positioning on the station's exterior.

It is the first investigation developed at JPL to launch on SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.