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."

Comments

Re:Waste of money

[hairyfeet]

Well we DO seem to have extinction level events, several of which are believed to be asteroids, and there is Apophis which may come close enough in 2029 to get pulled in for a hit in 2036. And that is what we know about, no telling what we don't.

Now am I saying the odds or good, or even better than hitting the powerball? nope, but it doesn't hurt to know more about what is out there and frankly space science has been so damned gutted the past few years if we can get some new birds up there scanning the skies by saying "ZOMFG we may need Bruce Willis and a crazy Russian ZOMFG!" then frankly I'm for it. Just imagine what we'll learn about what is out there even if it isn't gonna hit us? We may find asteroids that are good sources of raw materials, hell with space exploration frankly you'll never know what you are gonna find until you do it.

So sign me up, seems a better use of money than pissing another trillion down the drain blowing some country up so we can hand out no bid contracts just to rebuild it again.