spacetoday.net: Private group announces plan for asteroid mission

Posted: Fri, Jun 29, 2012, 6:48 AM ET (1048 GMT)
B612 Foundation Sentinel spacecraft illustration (B612 Foundation)

A non-profit organization announced Thursday its plans to fly a spacecraft to search for potentially hazardous near Earth objects (NEOs). The B612 Foundation said it is raising funding to develop a spacecraft called Sentinel, a space telescope that will be placed in orbit around the Sun at about Venus's distance from the Sun. From that vantage point, Sentinel will look out and use infrared detectors to look for NEOs, scanning half the sky every 26 days. The foundation believes that this mission can discover half a million NEOs during a 5.5-year mission, including 90 percent of those objects 140 meters in diameter or larger. B612 expoects the spacecraft, to be build by Ball Aerospace, to cost a few hundred million dollars and be ready for launch in 2017 or 2018, and is currently seeking donations to fund its development.