lease ’s face it , Bruce Willis is getting old . We can no longer rely on the option of just strap him to a rocket salad , shooting state Eruca sativa towards an oncoming asteroid , and hoping for the best . Luckily , the Silicon Valley - based B612 foundation is develop the world ’s most in advance asteroid former warning arrangement .
comet and asteroids descend to Earth regularly . Small diameter rocks combust up in our air as shooting genius . However , larger ones are potential Earth - enders — rock’n’roll with a 200 - foundation diameter could level a metropolis , and a half - naut mi - diam meteoroid could cause another Cretaceous - level mass extinction .
NASA runs the Near - Earth Object program , which searches the skies for space Stone more than a half - mile wide . It has watch roughly 10,000 object — an estimated 90 percent of those are in our corner of the solar system — with its fleet of demesne - base scope . Now , what the NEO program is n’t looking for are small but only slightly less lethal meteor , like the one that leveled the Tunguska area in northern Russia in 1908 with the same explosive force as theFat Man . Scientists estimate we ’ve only found about one percent of the half million or so rock of this size .
“ That ’s the urging of this , ” Ed Lu , former astronaut and current chair of the B612 Foundation said in a wardrobe financial statement . “ If there is an asteroid out there that may strike in the next 10 or 20 years , then sentence ’s a wastin ’ . ”
The B612 Foundation is settle in Mountain View , CA and is name after the home of “ The Little Prince ” from Antoine de Saint - Exupery ’s noted nipper ’s book . lead by former space bird astronaut , Ed Lu , as well as a veritable who ’s who of ex - NASA employees and Ball Aerospace engineers , the foundation has been working since the bit of the C to enhance awareness of the dangers of these asteroid and to develop a means to detect and bend incoming threats . While B612 has n’t quite figured out deflection part of that equating yet , the groundwork is already prepping the detect organisation — the Sentinel .
The $ 200 million Sentinel telescope , when launched in 2017 , will become the first privately - funded deep space probe ever . Designed by the Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation , the same folks that brought us the Kepler and Spitzer telescopes , the Sentinel shares much of their technologies . The Sentinel employs an HD camera made up of multiple , smaller detectors to scan 165 square arcdegree per hour for moving object around 50 meters in diam . This will countenance scientists to generate a mathematical function of our supernal neighbourhood and start calculating the orbits of nearby asteroids , creating an early admonition system of form . “ We ’ll find about a half a million , ” say Lu . “ This is croak to be the unequivocal map of the intimate solar system . ”
The company currently plans to launch their telescope on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket , sending the ballistic capsule toward the inner solar system into a graveness assist slingshot around Venus . The roughly 25 - human foot telescope will orbit the sun from between 0.6 and 0.8 meter the Earth - Sunday aloofness and is planned to have a 5.5 - yr initial mission to find 90 percent of asteroids larger than 500 foot . It also think to map out a significant number of 100 - ft - diameter asteroid . The infrared scope will be launched into a heliocentric orbit sometime by and by this decade that will at times piazza it 170 million naut mi from Earth . It will scan the entire night half of the sky every 26 days , discover every moving object . In just 5.5 old age , B612 project to have map the scope of 98 percent of all near ground asteroid — more than half a million objects full .
After launching , the telescope will instantly begin to explore for approximate - Earth target and calculate their orbit , making sure that none of them intersect with Earth ’s . Being a consecrate asteroid - find oneself mission and working from space will give it a tremendous advantage over land - based telescopes . Within a calendar month , Lu calculates that the telescope will come up 16,000 objects , more than doubling the know catalog . Ultimately , he hopes to elaborate the number of known asteroids by a hundred - fold .
The project will release asteroid trajectories publicly through an be web that includes the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge , Massachusetts . Many researchers are eager to get their hired man on such data . At a conference the B612 Foundation held last twelvemonth , about 50 interested scientist gathered to hash out dear - world asteroid threats .
[ Wired – B612 – Popular Science – Space – BBC ]
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