Space-for-All at HobbySpace

The Planetary Resources crowd-funding campaign for the ARKYD Space Telescope has reached 9,558 Backers, $858,127 pledged of $1,000,000 goal with 19 days to go. To boost pledges far beyond that goal they have posted an ambitious Stretch Goal:

Planetary Resources Needs YOUR Help to Hunt for Alien Planets

Asteroid mining company announces new crowdfunding goal to enhance
the ARKYD telescope with capability to search for alien planets around distant stars

Bellevue, Washington – June 11, 2013 – Alien planets are out there and Planetary Resources needs your help to find them! That’s right, the same high-powered telescope technology being used by Planetary Resources to identify near-Earth asteroids can also be used to hunt for what scientists call extrasolar planets or “exoplanets” – which are very much alien worlds. For the first-time ever, this capability will be placed directly into the hands of students, researchers and citizen scientists.

Planetary Resources recently launched a campaign on Kickstarter for the ARKYD – the world’s first crowdfunded space telescope accessible to the public. In only 13 days, the company has already reached well over 85 percent of its original US$1 million goal. Today, the company is announcing that if the total amount pledged exceeds US$2 million in the 19 days remaining in the campaign, it will invest the additional funds to enhance the ARKYD space telescope technology to enable it to search for alien planets!

Visit Planetary Resources’ Kickstarter Page to Pledge Your Support: http://bit.ly/ARKYD-100

These upgrades would add exoplanet transit detection capability by enhancing the telescope’s stability systems and dedicating time to monitor candidate star systems. A special bonus is that this upgrade would also allow for better measurement of the spin-properties of asteroids, using the same technique. “While the ARKYD won’t rival NASA’s US$600 million Kepler spacecraft, which may have to end its mission due to a recent equipment failure, the enhanced ARKYD will be a huge step toward important new scientific discoveries enabled by citizen scientists,” said Chris Lewicki, President and Chief Engineer, Planetary Resources, Inc.

The company is partnered with one of the world’s leading exoplanet scientists, Sara Seager, Ph.D. of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Seager, Professor of Physics and Planetary Science at MIT stated, “We’re excited about this game-changing approach that could transform how we do science in the future. It’s not just about advanced technology in a small satellite, but a crowdfunded approach to space science that could be revolutionary. The enhanced version of the ARKYD telescope will be an important source of data for exoplanets that can only be obtained from space, above the blurring effects of Earth’s turbulent atmosphere.”

Peter H. Diamandis, M.D., Planetary Resources Co-Founder and Co-Chairman said, “We’re confident this campaign will exceed the original goal of US$1 million dollars. We’re now focusing on enhancing the capabilities of the telescope and creating meaningful and epic crowd involvement.” He continued, “We’re a hardware and inspiration company, and we’re thrilled to provide a new generation of space pioneers with the ability to take a hands-on approach to exploration.”

To date, more than 9,400 people from around the globe have pledged their support for the ARKYD. Over 8,000 have requested their very own #SpaceSelfie, another 900 people have donated time on the ARKYD to education and many others are looking to gain access to the telescope to explore the cosmos on their own!

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.

The WFIRST (Wide Field Infra-Red Survey Telescope) project aims to use one of the space telescopes donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) last year primarily for the study of distant supernova and galaxies. However, it also will “be a bonanza for exoplanet studies” : Exoplanet capabilities of WFIRST-2.4 – The Space Review

In addition to microlensing to detect exoplanets, a coronagraph

will block out a large fraction of the light of target stars. With much of the glare of parent stars suppressed, the telescope will be able to directly image any planets orbiting that star. The goal is to produce as narrow an image of the space around the star as possible. This is referred to as the Inner Working Angle (IWA). The more that the IWA can be shrunk, the more inner planets can be imaged. It is possible that the enhanced WFIRST may be able to view planets as close as 1 astronomical unit (AU) to their parent star, depending on their distance from our solar system.

John Kelly applauds the use of surplus assets : Sharing technology leaps us ahead – Florida Today