The B612 Foundation is a private nonprofit foundation headquartered in Mill Valley, California, United States, dedicated to planetary science and planetary defense against asteroids and other near-Earth object (NEO) impacts. It is led mainly by scientists, former astronauts and engineers from the Institute for Advanced Study, Southwest Research Institute, Stanford University, NASA and the space industry.
As a non-governmental organization it has conducted two lines of related research to help detect near-Earth objects (NEO) that could one day strike the Earth, and find the technological means to divert their path to avoid such collisions. It also assisted the Association of Space Explorers in helping the United Nations establish the International Asteroid Warning Network, as well as a Space Missions Planning Advisory Group to provide oversight on proposed asteroid deflection missions.
In 2012, the foundation announced it would design and build a privately financed asteroid-finding space observatory, the Sentinel Space Telescope, to be launched in 2017–2018. Once stationed in a heliocentric orbit around the Sun similar to that of Venus, Sentinel's supercooled infrared detector would have helped identify dangerous asteroids and other near-Earth objects that pose a risk of collision with Earth. In the absence of substantive planetary defense provided by governments worldwide, B612 attempted a fundraising campaign to cover the Sentinel Mission, estimated at $450 million for 10 years of operation. Fundraising was unsuccessful, and the program was cancelled in 2017, with the Foundation pursuing a constellation of smaller satellites instead.
The B612 Foundation is named for the asteroid home of the eponymous hero of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's 1943 book The Little Prince.
Background
When an asteroid enters the planet's atmosphere it becomes known as a 'meteor'; those that survive and fall to the Earth's surface are then called 'meteorites'. While basketball-sized meteors occur almost daily, and compact car-sized ones about yearly, they usually burn up or explode high above the Earth as bolides, (fireballs), often with little notice. During an average 24-hour period, the Earth sweeps through some 100 million particles of interplanetary dust and pieces of cosmic debris, only a very minor amount of which arrives on the ground as meteorites.
The larger in size asteroids or other near-Earth objects are, the less frequently they impact the planet's atmosphere—large meteors seen in the skies are extremely rare, while medium-sized ones are less so, and much smaller ones are more commonplace. Although stony asteroids often explode high in the atmosphere, some objects, especially iron-nickel meteors and other types descending at a steep angle, can explode close to ground level or even directly impact onto land or sea. In the U.S. State of Arizona, the Meteor Crater (officially named Barringer Crater) formed in a fraction of a second as nearly 160 million tonnes of limestone and bedrock were uplifted, creating its crater rim on formerly flat terrain. The asteroid that produced the Barringer Crater was only about in size; however it impacted the ground at a velocity of and struck with an impact energy of —about 625 times greater than the bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima during World War II. Tsunamis can also occur after a medium-sized or larger asteroid impacts an ocean surface or other large body of water.
The probability of a mid-sized asteroid (similar to the one that destroyed the Tunguska River area of Russia in 1908) hitting Earth during the 21st century has been estimated at 30%.Hernandez, Vittorio. Former NASA Astronaut Predicts 30% Chance of Near-Earth Asteroid Hit Within Century , International Business Times, March 21, 2013. Since the Earth is currently more populated than in previous eras, there is a greater risk of large casualties arising from a mid-sized asteroid impact. However, as of the early 2010s, only about a half of one per cent of Tunguska-type near-Earth objects had been located by astronomers using ground-based telescope surveys.
The need for an asteroid detection program has been compared to the need for monsoon, typhoon, and hurricane preparedness. As the B612 Foundation and other organizations have publicly noted, of the different types of natural catastrophes that can occur on our planet, asteroid strikes are the only one that the world now has the technical capability to prevent.
B612 is one of several organizations to propose detailed dynamic surveys of near-Earth objects and preventative measures such as asteroid deflection. Other groups include Chinese researchers, NASA in the United States, NEOShield in Europe, as well as the international Spaceguard Foundation. In December 2009 Roscosmos Russian Federal Space Agency director Anatoly Perminov proposed a deflection mission to the asteroid 99942 Apophis, which at the time had been thought to pose a risk of collision with Earth.
Asteroid deflection workshop The Foundation evolved from an informal one-day workshop on asteroid deflection strategies during October 2001, organized by Dutch astrophysicist Piet Hut along with physicist and then-U.S. astronaut Ed Lu, presented at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Twenty researchers participated, principally from various NASA facilities plus the non-profit Southwest Research Institute, but as well from the University of California, University of Michigan, and the Institute for Independent Study. All were interested in contributing to the proposed creation of an asteroid deflection capability. The seminar participants included Rusty Schweickart, a former Apollo astronaut, and Clark Chapman, a planetary scientist.
Among the proposed experimental research missions discussed were the alteration of an asteroid's spin rate, as well as changing the orbit of one part of a binary asteroid pair. Following the seminar's round-table discussions the workshop generally agreed that the vehicle of choice (needed to deflect an asteroid) would be powered by a low-thrust ion plasma engine. Landing a nuclear-powered plasma engined pusher vehicle on the asteroid's surface was seen as promising, an early proposal that would later encounter a number of technical obstacles. Nuclear explosives were seen as "too risky and unpredictable" for several reasons, warranting the view that gently altering an asteroid's trajectory was the safest approach—but also a method requiring years of advance warning to successfully accomplish.
B612 Project and Foundation The October 2001 asteroid deflection workshop participants created the "B612 Project" to further their research. Schweickart, along with Drs. Hut, Lu and Chapman, then formed the B612 Foundation on October 7, 2002, with its first goal being to "significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner". Schweickart became an early public face of the foundation and served as chairman on its board of directors. In 2010, as part of an ad hoc task force on planetary defense, he advocated increasing NASA's annual budget by $250M–$300 million over a 10-year period (with an operational maintenance budget of up to $75 million per year after that) in order to more fully catalog the near-Earth objects that can pose a threat to Earth, and to also fully develop impact avoidance capabilities. That recommended level of budgetary support would permit up to 10–20 years of advance warning in order to create a sufficient window for the required trajectory deflection.
Their recommendations were made to a NASA Advisory Council, but were ultimately unsuccessful in obtaining Congressional funding due to NASA, lacking a legislated mandate for planetary protection, not being permitted to request it. Feeling it would be imprudent to continue waiting for substantive government or United Nations action, B612 began a fundraising campaign in 2012 to cover the approximate US$450 million cost for the development, launch and operations of an asteroid-finding space telescope, to be called Sentinel, with a goal of raising $30 to $40 million per year. The space observatory's objective would be to accurately survey near-Earth objects from an orbit similar to that of Venus, creating a large dynamic catalog of such objects that would help identify dangerous Earth-impactors, deemed a necessary precursor to mounting any asteroid deflection mission.
In March and April 2013, several weeks after the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion injured some 1,500 people, the U.S. Congress held hearings for "...the Risks, Impacts and Solutions for Space Threats". They received testimony from B612 head Ed Lu (see video at right), as well as Dr. Donald K. Yeomans, head of NASA's NEO Program Office, Dr. Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland and co-chair of a 2009 U.S. National Research Council study on asteroid threats, plus others. The difficulty of quickly intercepting an imminent asteroid threat to Earth was made apparent during the testimony:
As a result of a set of hearings by the NASA Advisory Committee following the Chelyabinsk explosion in 2013, in conjunction with a White House request to double its budget, NASA's Near Earth Object Program funding was increased to $40.5 M/year in its FY2014 (Fiscal Year 2014) budget. It had previously been increased to $20.5 M/year in FY2012 (about 0.1% of NASA's annual budget at the time), from an average of about $4 M/year between 2002 and 2010.
Asteroid hazard reassessment On Earth Day, April 22, 2014, the B612 Foundation formally presented a revised assessment on the frequency of "city-killer" type impact events, based on research led by Canadian planetary scientist Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario's (UWO) Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration. Dr. Brown's analysis, "A 500-Kiloton Airburst Over Chelyabinsk and An Enhanced Hazard from Small Impactors", published in the journals Science and Nature, was used to produce a short computer-animated video that was presented to the media at the Seattle Museum of Flight.
The nearly one-and-a-half-minute video displayed a rotating globe with the impact points of about 25 asteroids measuring more than one, and up to 600 kilotons of blast force, that struck the Earth from 2000 to 2013 (for comparison, the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was equivalent to about 16 kilotons of TNT blast force). Of those impacts between 2000 and 2013, eight of them were as large, or larger, than the Hiroshima bomb. Only one of the asteroids, 2008 TC3, was detected in advance, some 19 hours before exploding in the atmosphere. As was the case with the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor, no warnings were issued for any of the other impacts.