Category Archives: Space participation

Asteroids & Comets, Space participation

Asteroid Zoo citizen science program – stretch goal for Planetary Resources Arkyd Kickstarter

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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Astronomy, Space participation

ARKYD space telescope Kickstarter passes $1M goal

The Planetary Resources Kickstarter campaign for the ARKYD public access space telescope surpassed the $1,000,000 goal today. At the moment, they have 11,356 backers, with $1,003,126 pledged and 11 days to go.

Just yesterday (see post  here) they had $916,582 after about 20 days of fundraising. It was starting to look like the pledges had leveled off and they might have trouble reaching $1M. When I saw the total this evening, I first thought that a single person might have given them a boost but the number of backers had also jumped from about 100 per day to over 700 today as seen in the charts at ARKYD – Kicktraq.

They also introduced new Add-ons and a new mystery stretch goal for $1.5M:

New $1.5M Mystery Stretch Goal Revealed!
When we reach $1.5 Million in pledges, every selfie pledge or higher will receive an exclusive digital Beta-Selfie, taken next year during the crucial integration phase of spacecraft build! Become a part of the build and catch a glimpse of our clean-room squad in action!

Update: Here is an update and video from PR:

Many of you have just crowdfunded a space telescope, bringing space within reach for everyone!  You know who you are – THANK YOU!!!  We passed our $1M campaign funding goal today and are now on the way to our $2M stretch goal of searching for Alien Planets.  Help us get there.

We passed 11,000 backers while I was live on-air with Leo at Twit.tv / Triangulation, and thanks to The Oatmeal’s pledge and fan support, we’re accelerating towards an exciting final 10 days of the campaign!

Time is running out to join the community that is democratizing space exploration and sharing it with the world.  Make your pledge!  This is only the start of something REALLY BIG.

There’s a ton of new stuff over on our Kickstarter page, including live events next week with Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute), Seth Green and Hank Green, Richard Garriott (Lord British) and Jon Mavor (Planetary Annihilation), add-on pledge levels, new stretch goals, and our main Kickstarter video translated into more than a dozen languages, including Klingon.

Astronomy, Education, Space participation

Update on the Arkyd space telescope Kickstarter campaign

2 Comments

The Planetary Resources fund-raising for the ARKYD public access space telescope has reached 10,350 Backers and $916,582 pledged towards the $1,000,000 goal with 12 days to go. That’s a tremendous accomplishment for a space Kickstarter campaign but it actually seems a bit disappointing considering how fast the pledges were coming in during the first couple weeks. It looks like they will have to work hard just to make sure they reach the $1.0M goal, much less meet their $2M stretch goal to fund exoplanet searches.

Kickstarter campaigns often have a surge in the final few days as efforts intensify to meet the deadline. So it’s still likely they will beat the $1M goal and it will be interesting to see how far past it they get.

Follow their money raising rate at ARKYD: A Space Telescope for Everyone by Planetary Resources :: Kicktraq.

ExoplanetStretchGoal

Education, Space participation, Spaceflight & Parabolic Flight

The next-gen Teachers in Space

Ed Wright of Citizens in Space gives the background to various programs aimed at sending teachers and other educators into space and lays out his organization’s plans for the future: Teachers in Space: The Next Generation – CitizensInSpace.org.

Citizens in Space continues to expand and grow. We have not abandoned the original goals of Teachers in Space, nor have we “split” the program or transferred any part of the program to another organization. We still hope to enable a large number of teachers to fly in space and return to the classroom, along with people from every walk of life.

There are other organizations that have the goal of flying teachers in space. The Challenger Center for Space Science Education has acquired two seats on a Virgin Galactic flight for teachers. Virgin Galactic has also donated a seat to the Royal Air Force for a British teacher. So far, however, we are the only organization that has purchased a significant block of flights and initiated a training program for citizen astronauts. We hope we will not be alone much longer. Regardless of what other organizations do, however, our path is clear. As President Reagan said, our hopes and journeys will continue.

SETI, Space participation

Lone Signal – using a big dish to broadcast messages to ET

The LONE SIGNAL project, which officially opens on June 18th,  wants to send messages to an extraterrestrial intelligence (METI) using a former NASA radio dish near Carmel, California : Lone Signal: METI Teams Up With Citizen Science To Try And Make First Contact – Science 2.0

Lone Signal is going to start firing off messages on a recurring basis and its first target is Gliese 526 in the constellation Boötes, just under 18 light years from us. And they are going to let the public decide what those messages are, no prime numbers or atomic elements dictated by committees. It can be pictures of your cat, though if you just sign up you can only send one short text message – all the electricity to fire up a 97 foot dish and transmit into space doesn’t come cheap – and more elaborate stuff is only available if you contribute money to the cause. After it’s sent, you can monitor how far it has gone and discuss with other people in the Lone Signal community.

The article includes an interview with Jamie King of Lone Signal.