The B612 Foundation is raising money for their asteroid finding space observatory by selling memorabilia from Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart and Shuttle/ISS astronaut Ed Lu:
Here is a new video message from Ed Lu: Ed Lu’s Message: Why You Should Support Sentinel – B612 Foundation
ESA assists an artist in sending her recast meteorite back to space:
Meteorite science meets an artist’s dream of spaceflight
28 June 2013: Inspired by the dream of space exploration, artist Katie Paterson imagined sending a piece of her meteorite artwork back to space in a celebration of science, art and human technology. Her vision may just become reality, with a little help from ESA’s can-do cargo vessel.
Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky
Paterson’s installation, Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky, is on display at the UK’s prestigious Turner Contemporary gallery this summer, and features a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite that has been cast, melted and recast as a model of itself, retaining its original form.
Katie describes Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky as presenting curious visitors with a newly formed yet still ancient meteorite, imbued with cosmic history.
“The iron, metal and dust inside have been reformed, and the layers of its cosmic lifespan – the intermixing of space and time, the billions of years of pressure and change – have become collapsed, transformed and then, by the hand of human technology, renewed,” she says.
Back to where it came from
While developing the concept for the installation, Katie was struck by an idea: would it be possible to ‘close the story’ of her Campo del Cielo meteorite by returning it back to space?
“By sending it ‘back to space’, I hope to fire the imaginations of students, youth – anyone, really – and foster a discussion on our relation with the wider universe,” she explains.
Seminal fragments of our cosmic origins
For ESA, meteors, meteorites and asteroids are crucial to the scientific understanding of our Solar System, and they are central to numerous Agency activities such as the Rosetta comet mission, future robotic missions to asteroids, near-Earth object studies, Space Situational Awareness and even potential human missions beyond the Earth, Moon and Mars.
“Scientists recognise comets, meteorites and asteroids as the debris left over from the formation of our Solar System,” says Dr Detlef Koschny, responsible for near-Earth object activities at ESA’s Space Situational Awareness office.
“As such, studying them up close, if they fall to Earth, or deep in space, via telescopes or with spacecraft – like ESA’s Rosetta – is vital to understanding how planets and our Solar System emerged.
So, really, objects like this bit of meteorite symbolise a lot of what we are trying to achieve.”
Earlier this year, Katie contacted ESA to enquire if it would be possible to send a symbolic piece of her meteorite to the International Space Station as a way to support public outreach and awareness of the intersection between science and art.
ESA agreed, and has provisionally allocated space on the next Automated Transfer Vehicle, Georges Lemaître, due to voyage to the orbital outpost in 2014. A small sample of the meteorite will be carefully assessed for flight qualification, and if it passes, can be delivered ‘back to space’ to the Station.
“I hope this helps inspire people everywhere to think about the really big questions: the origin of life, the natural history of our Solar System and home planet, and our relationship with time, both geological and cosmic,” says Detlef.
“These are important questions, and space exploration together with art are helping us answer them.”
ATV Albert Einstein arrives at the ISS
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Updates on this project will be posted at Albert Einstein | Follow ESA’s Automated Transfer Vehicle missions to the ISS – Blog/ESA.
That strange rock you come across might be from outer space : Farmers’ Rock Turns Out to Be Rare Meteorite | Arlington, Minn. Meteorite – Space.com
On May 30, the couple brought their find to Alexander’s lab and allowed him to chip 0.02 ounces (0.6 grams) off the edge of it for analysis under a scanning electron microscope. The rock was iron, and contained about 8 percent nickel — a telltale giveaway. Iron objects on Earth contain almost no nickel, but iron rocks from space are usually between 5 and 20 percent nickel. The microscope also revealed what’s called a Widmanstätten pattern of nickel-iron crystals that’s unique to meteorites
The latest Hangout of the Planetary Society welcomes Chris Lewicki of Planetary Resources, Inc. who talks about their Arkyd space telesope project and asteroid mining : Planetary Society Hangout: Arkyd Telescopes, Planetary Resources, Chris Lewicki, Bill Nye – The Planetary Society
Planetary Resources and Zooniverse plan a collaboration – Asteroid Zoo – if the Kickstarter campaign for the ARKYD space telescope for the public reaches $1.7M:
Planetary Resources Calls on Citizens of Earth to Aid in Planetary Defense
Company Announces New Crowdfunding Goal to Create “Asteroid Zoo”
for Public to Search for Dangerous Near-Earth Asteroids
Bellevue, Washington – June 27, 2013 – Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company, has announced a collaboration with Zooniverse that will empower citizen scientists to aid in the search for dangerous near Earth asteroids (NEAs) and support planetary defense.
Planetary Resources is in the final stretch of its Kickstarter campaign, ARKYD – the world’s first crowdfunded space telescope for the public, which has generated nearly 15,000 supporters and US$1.2M in pledges. If pledges reach US$1.7 million in the three remaining days of the campaign, Planetary Resources and Zooniverse will create Asteroid Zoo, a program to allow students, citizen scientists and space enthusiasts to find potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) at home and help train computers to better find them in the future.
Visit Planetary Resources’ Kickstarter Page to Help Reach this Goal: http://bit.ly/ARKYD-100
“Planetary Resources values the power of the connected mind; when working together, we can accomplish much more than any of us can do alone,” said Chris Lewicki, President and Chief Engineer, Planetary Resources, Inc. “We’re creating this program to harness the public’s interest in space and asteroid detection, while providing a very real benefit to our planet.”
Chris Lintott, astronomer at the University of Oxford and Zooniverse Principal Investigator said, “Zooniverse volunteers have already inspected more than a million galaxies, discovered planets and kept an eye on solar storms. We’re looking forward to working with Planetary Resources to make sure citizen scientists everywhere can make a real contribution to spotting asteroids, too.”
It’s been 66 million years since scientists believe a 10-kilometer asteroid slammed into the Earth, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today, there are approximately 620,000 objects that are actively tracked in our Solar System, which represents merely one percent of the 60 million asteroids estimated to orbit the Sun. The NEA population of 1 km+ asteroids is approximately 860, over 90 percent of which are known and 155 of which might be described as extinction-level/dinosaur-killing PHAs. It is currently estimated that less than one percent of smaller asteroids (less than 100m) have been found. None of these currently pose a threat to Earth, and while many of these asteroids are small, they are capable of regional disaster, such as massive damage to a metro city.
Modeled after Zooniverse’s popular Galaxy Zoo and other astronomy projects, Asteroid Zoo will allow the public to search through terabytes of data collected by Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) for undiscovered asteroids in a fun, game-like process from their personal computers. The public’s findings will be used by scientists to develop advanced asteroid-searching technology for telescopes on Earth and in space, including the ARKYD. Of all the asteroids ever discovered, 93 percent were found in the last 15 years and nearly half of the near-Earth asteroids were discovered by CSS.
Eric Christensen, Principal Investigator for the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey stated, “We’re excited to open our archive of more than three-million images to citizen scientists around the world, and look forward to seeing what surprises are hiding in the data set. The results of this effort will provide invaluable feedback that we can use to make CSS a better survey.”
Defending our planet from PHAs is also a top priority for NASA, which recently announced a new grand challenge of “finding all asteroid threats to human populations and knowing what to do about them.”
About Planetary Resources
Planetary Resources, Inc. was founded in 2009 by Eric Anderson and Dr. Peter H. Diamandis. Our vision is to establish a new paradigm for resource utilization that will bring the Solar System within humanity’s economic sphere of influence. The company will conduct low-cost robotic space exploration beginning with the Arkyd Series of space missions that will identify the most commercially viable near-Earth asteroids. These initial missions will assist the company in enabling the retrieval of raw materials from these select asteroids, including water, precious metals and more.
Planetary Resources is financed by industry-launching visionaries, three of whom include Google’s CEO Larry Page & Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt; and Ross Perot, Jr., Chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group; who are committed to expanding the world’s resource base so humanity can continue to grow and prosper for centuries to come. Some of the company’s partners and advisors include the Bechtel Corporation; film maker and explorer James Cameron; former Chief of Staff, United States Air Force General T. Michael Moseley (Ret.); and Sara Seager, Ph.D., Professor of Planetary Science and Physics at MIT. Members of the company’s technical staff have worked on every recent U.S. Mars lander including Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity, and include other key non-aerospace and safety-critical disciplines. For more information, please visit www.planetaryresources.com.
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