B612 Sentinel Space Telescope to Hunt Dangerous Asteroids

Artist's Illustration of the B612 Foundation's Sentinel mission, which will search for potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroids.

CREDIT: B612

With the dangers of rogue asteroids made clear by the surprise explosion of a meteor over Russia in February, a non-profit organization is ramping up its effort to search for potentially hazardous space rocks near Earth.

The B612 Foundation was started in 2002 by former NASA astronauts Ed Lu and Rusty Schweickart with colleagues. The organization aims to launch a space telescope called Sentinel in 2017 to catalog near-Earth asteroids, including those that may pose a danger to Earth.

To date, about 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids large enough to destroy the entire planet (about 1 kilometer, or 0.6 miles wide) have been discovered, but far fewer of the smaller, city-killing size (roughly 140 meters, or 460 feet, in diameter) have been found.

"We are essentially flying blind in a cosmic shooting gallery," Scott Hubbard, B612 program architect, told reporters on Tuesday (April 9) at the 29th annual National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo.

This reality was starkly illustrated on Feb. 15, when a 55-foot-wide (17 meters) meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, just hours before an asteroid almost three times its size called 2012 DA14 flew uncomfortably close to Earth.

Sentinel's goal is to detect about 90 percent of this city-killing class of asteroids over a period of 6.5 years.

The $450 million mission is to be privately funded, though the foundation has partnered with NASA to share its data and use the agency's Deep Space Network of satellites to facilitate communications between Sentinel and the ground. NASA and lawmakers have said they enthusiastically support the mission and the B612 Foundation's efforts.

"We must better recognize what the private sector can do to aid our efforts to protect the world," Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, said during a Congressional hearing on the asteroid issue Wednesday (April 10).

NEO Asteroid Detection: Can Private Funded B612 do more

NASA's efforts in detecting, monitoring and alerting communities about NEOs and potential asteroid strikes have received criticism from many areas.

Some of the most ardent critics are ex-Nasa staff members. Nasa's NEO efforts are deemed insufficient by former agency astronauts and scientists who last year launched a bold project with high aims.

To design, finance, build and launch the first private space telescope to track asteroids and protect humanity.

The foundation called B612 is trying to raise $450 million to build and deploy a space telescope that would be called Sentinel and placed in orbit around the sun, at a distance of 273 million kilometers from the Earth to detect most objects that are otherwise not visible.

You realize that we have a responsibility to continue safe operations on board Spaceship Earth. And that means protecting humanity.” ~ Ed Lu, former NASA astronaut, STS-84, STS-106, Soyuz TMA-2, ISS Expedition 7

Organized by Piet Hut and Ed Lu, 

a group of 20 experts, in fields ranging from asteroid studies to propulsion to power technologies, came together around our common concern about Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and how a large impact on Earth could destroy human civilization.

“We feel a certain urgency to get on with it so that we can be confident that we’re not going to have a cosmic disaster here for no good, justifiable reason, just because we didn’t get with it. So let’s get with it. That’s the name of the game.” ~ Rusty Schweickart, Lunar Module Pilot, Apollo 9