Foundation Launches Effort to Place Telescope Around Sun
Foundation Launches Effort to Place Telescope Around Sun
The B612 Foundation, which takes its name from a planet in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's fictional work The Little Prince, has announced plans to build, launch, and operate the first privately funded deep-space mission.
Code-named Sentinel, the effort aims to develop, test, and place in orbit around the Sun a wide-angle, infrared telescope for a mission of discovery and mapping, with special attention paid to asteroids that could be on a collision course with Earth. To that end, the foundation will work with Ball Aerospace, which designed the Spitzer and Kepler Space Telescopes, to build the Sentinel Infrared (IR) Space Telescope. Development and testing of the telescope is expected to take five years.
Once positioned in an orbit ranging up to 170 million miles from Earth, Sentinel will scan the solar system and beyond for every moving object it can find. Data collected by the telescope will be relayed via NASA's Deep Space Network to the Laboratory for Space Physics in Boulder, Colorado, where it will be analyzed and distributed to education, research, scientific institutions, and governments via NASA's Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As part of the B612 Foundation-NASA Space Act Agreement of June 2012, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will conduct a comprehensive ateroid hazard analysis involving orbit determinations and threat assessments.
"We believe our goal of opening up the solar system and protecting humanity is one that will resonate worldwide," said Ed Lu, chairman and CEO of the foundation and an astronaut who has flown in the Space Shuttle, the Russian Soyuz space capsule, and the International Space Station. "We've garnered the support and advice of a number of individuals experienced with successful philanthropic capital campaigns of similar size or larger, and will continue to build our network. We've been given a gift, and the gift is that we have the ability now to go out there and actually do something which positively affects the future of humanity on Earth."
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