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Two Space Missions Planned To Look For Killer Asteroids
The Bad Astronomer writes "Today, the B612 Foundation announced it's seeking private funds to build Sentinel, a space mission to find Earth-threatening asteroids. Placed in a Venus-like orbit, it should find a large fraction of these potentially hazardous rocks. At the same time, the NEOCam (Near Earth Object camera) website went live today. This is a separate, publicly-funded space mission also designed to look for these asteroids. While Sentinel will concentrate on finding them and getting accurate positions and orbits, NEOCam will focus more on getting their physical characteristics. While not strictly competing with each other, they are more complementary; with both missions flying (in the 2017 time range) we will learn a huge amount about the asteroid threat from space."
When was the last time in recorded history an asteroid landed on people? That's right, never. Even the Tunguska thing flattened a lot of trees but killed no one. That's because the Earth isn't rigged like Coruscant, or Trantor. But if you want to look for rocks which have essentially the same orbit as the Earth, and could be nudged into a double-lunar capture to become a source of raw materials in cis-lunar space, I'll sign up for that one.