Saving humanity from going out like the dinosaurs? (Image: B612 Foundation 2012)

Citizens, defend thyselves. A private, non-profit organisation plans to launch a space telescope dedicated to finding deadly asteroids before they find us – a project that governments have been slow to take up.

The B612 Foundation – named for the asteroid that was home to The Little Prince – today announced their plan to build, fly and operate the first private space telescope: an asteroid hunter called Sentinel. The telescope will cost several hundred million dollars, which the foundation hopes to raise through philanthropic donations in the next six years.

“We think this is eminently doable,” says Ed Lu, a former NASA astronaut and chief executive officer of B612, who compared the project to funding museums or concert halls. “Their donor base is local. Ours is global. This telescope will be owned by the people of the world.”


A little nudge

The inner solar system is teeming with asteroids, millions of which cross Earth’s path and are large enough to do serious damage on impact. Astronomers estimate that we have seen just 1 per cent of the asteroids larger than the one that leveled the forests of Tunguska, Siberia in 1908 – half a million are still out there, unseen.

The good news is, there are ways to nudge them out of our path – if we have enough warning. In 2005, Congress directed NASA to find 90 per cent of near-Earth asteroids 140 metres across and larger by 2020 – but a 2010 panel found that existing surveys weren’t up to the job.

“Asteroids were being found, but no one was doing anything about what happens if we find one with our address on it,” says Rusty Schweickart, emeritus chair of B612 and an Apollo 9 astronaut. “NASA is sort of falling off the edge of a fiscal cliff. We’ve got 99 per cent of the objects left to go, and unfortunately NASA is not going to be able to do it.”

With the success of the SpaceX Dragon capsule, which recently became the first private spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station, and suggestions to mine near-Earth asteroids for minerals, privately funded space missions are becoming more realistic.

Looking out for us

Sentinel will conduct its mission to protect humans from meeting the same fate as the dinosaurs from a solar orbit about the same distance from the Sun as Venus. The 50 centimetre wide telescope will look outward towards the Earth and beyond, so that dangerous asteroids will always be fully lit. It will look in infrared wavelengths, where small asteroids that don’t reflect much light can be detected by their heat.

The team hopes to launch Sentinel on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in 2017 or 2018, and keep the telescope in operation for 5.5 years, taking four images of the night sky every 26 days. Lu predicts that it will find more asteroids in its first month than all previous telescopes combined.

“I think that’s important, and it’s something that we need,” says Jose Luis Galache of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Any telescope that’s looking for asteroids is a good telescope.”