The B612 Foundation

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little prince on the original B612 asteroid.

On June 28th, the B612 foundation announced its plans to build, launch, and operate a deep-space telescope, Sentinel, which will find and map asteroids that could pose a danger to planet Earth. The official press release summarizes the mission:

“The orbits of the inner solar system where Earth lies are populated with a half million asteroids larger than the one that struck Tunguska (June 30, 1908), and yet we’ve identified and mapped only about one percent of these asteroids to date, said Ed Lu, Space Shuttle, Soyuz, and Space Station Astronaut, now Chairman and CEO of the B612 Foundation. “During its 5.5-year mission survey time, Sentinel will discover and track half a million Near Earth Asteroids, creating a dynamic map that will provide the blueprint for future exploration of our Solar System, while protecting the future of humanity on Earth.”

The B612 foundation has actually been around since 2001, working towards its mission of protecting Earth from a potentially disastrous asteroid impact. Prior to yesterday's announcement they had been focusing on technologies that could deflect threatening asteroids away from Earth's orbit, such as gravity tractors, kinetic impactors, and nuclear vaporization. However, they eventually realized that these technologies would be useless if no one knows the asteroid is coming, and that nobody was doing anything to find and track the most threatening asteroids. the organization's website explains: 

"NASA’s Spaceguard survey has succeeded in mapping 90 percent of the largest NEAs (larger than 1 km), yet due to the limitations of searching for asteroids using mostly ground based optical telescopes, only about one percent of these asteroids larger than Tunguska have been discovered and tracked to date. We are essentially flying around the Solar System with our eyes closed." 

The foundation estimates that in 5.5 years, Sentinel will have identified around half a million Near Earth Asteroids, with enough temporal information to project their orbits 100 years into the future. They think there is a 50% chance that the mission will identify at least one asteroid on a collision course with Earth that will need to be deflected in order to prevent a potentially catastrophic Earth impact.

The Sentinel Telescope (preliminary design by Ball Aerospace).
Source: B612

The Sentinel telescope will operate in the infrared, where asteroids stand out against the cold blackness of space, and be built by Ball Aerospace, the same folks that built the Kepler, Spitzer, and Hubble telescopes. It will be placed into an orbit similar to Venus's. This orbit will allow it to scan the side of the Sun opposite from Earth, which it would not be able to do if it were in orbit around Earth. However, it will also make operations and communications tricky because its distance from Earth will vary between 30 - 170 million miles, as opposed to the much more cozy 350 milles between Earth and Hubble. This is difficult but by no means unheard of - we have been operating spacecraft on Mars and beyond for tens of years. Current estimates put launch in 2017-2018, aboard one of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets.

Sentinel's orbit, which will allow it to map the side of the Sun opposite from Earth.
Source: B612 foundation. 

The B612 Foundation has signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA in June 2012, under which NASA will provide communications, tracking, and technical support for the Sentinel Mission. However, B612 is a nonprofit 501(c) 3 organization that "intends to raise the money for the Sentinel Mission in a manner similar to philanthropic capital campaigns for civic projects." If they do it right, and take advantage of flashy publicity videos and social media, I bet they could raise the necessary money very quickly - this is a subject that people can easily get excited about. 


Kudos to the B612 foundation for taking on a huge but necessary project. As John Stuart recently put it, "Do you know how rarely the news in 2012 looks and sounds how you thought news would look and sound in 2012?"

SpaceX Launches Dragon Capsule

After a two day delay due to an anomaly in one of the rocket engines, SpaceX's falcon 9 rocket blasted off early this morning, launching a Dragon capsule filled with cargo for the ISS.

There was plenty of news coverage of the event, but there were three little tidbits that I especially enjoyed.

1. The description of the humorous juxtaposition of the young, casual, SpaceX mission controllers with the suited NASA old guard in the control room: "Many of the SpaceX controllers wore untucked T-shirts and jeans or even shorts, a stark contrast to NASA’s old suit-and-tie shuttle team."



View from Spacex's Dragon spacecraft looking outward
at one of two solar array panels in the process of deploying.
Source: SpaceX

2. The picture that @SpaceX tweeted of the Dragon capsule solar arrays after they deployed. News reports say the cheering in the control room after the successful deployment of the solar arrays was almost louder than the cheering following the successful launch. In many ways, deploying the solar arrays is the most stressful, high stakes activity of commissioning. It takes less force, and different mechanics, to deploy arrays in a zero G environment than it does on Earth. In fact, many spacecraft (like the James Webb Telescope) are never able to fully test solar array deployment on Earth; gravity makes the solar arrays too heavy to operate with the motors that will be used in space. Operators must trust in the capability of the mechanical engineers and software simulations without ever testing the full deployment procedure. I have a friend who was working on a satellite at Space Systems Loral when one of the solar arrays failed to deploy during commissioning. In a last ditch effort to save the spacecraft they fired a spacecraft thruster at the array to try to push it out, and ended up losing whatever capability they had from the partially deployed array by blowing a hole through it. The satellite is now a very expensive piece of space junk, floating around in GEO with 100 million dollars worth of expensive, cutting edge technology and equipment, and no power. 
3. The smaller, public interest news articles about Celestis, the for-profit company that sent the ashes of 300 people to orbit aboard the Falcon 9. The "special payload" included the remains of James Doohan (Scotty, from Star Trek) and Gordon Cooper (one of the famous Mercury 7 astronauts). The ashes were in the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, which was jettisoned about 10 minutes after launch and will remain in orbit for about a year before its orbit decays and it burns up in Earth's atmosphere. This was actually the backup flight for Celestis - the first round of ashes failed to make it to orbit on the botched 2008 SpaceX launch that crashed into the Pacific Ocean.

Congrats to SpaceX! I am excited to follow the mission over the next two weeks as the Dragon performs several maneuvers and is eventually grabbed by ISS astronauts using the station's robotic arm. The SpaceX Ops team has a lot on their plate - It must be an incredibly exciting experience, but I don't envy the pressure on them or their likely sleep schedule for the next two weeks!

Поздравляю!

The Soyuz blasts off from Kazakhstan
AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel

A hearty Поздравляю! to NASA Astronaut Joe Acaba and the two Russian cosmonauts who blasted off last night in a Soyuz capsule headed for the ISS. If all goes well, they will get to witness the docking of SpaceX's Dragon Capsule on May 19 - the first by a private sector company. The capsule will contain cargo and supplies for the ISS, and will be the first of 12 planned supply missions to the ISS by SpaceX. If all goes well with the Dragon capsule missions (and the prerequisite Falcon 9 launches), SpaceX will eventually be shuttling astronauts to the ISS, eliminating the need for NASA to rely on Russia to taxi US astronauts back and forth.

Last night's launch is a good example of why we badly need the private sector to reinvigorate the space industry: After 50 years of NASA's monopoly on manned space flight, we are sending one astronaut at a time to the ISS in a Russian capsule designed in the 1960s. May 19 cannot come soon enough.