B612 Foundation Event at DFJ
Rusty Schweickart (the first Apollo Lunar Module Pilot) and Ed Lu (the first U.S. astronaut to fly on a Russian rocket) are the co-founders of B612, a non-profit named after the asteroid home of Le Petit Prince, which is setting out to privately launch a satellite to orbit the sun near Venus, looking outward to map all asteroid trajectories that might impact Earth at some point in the next century. The computational modeling of these trajectories compounds with Moore’s Law, making it possible to look farther into the future than ever before.
And the lower launch cost of a SpaceX rocket makes the entire B612 project cost less than the new wing on the San Francisco art museum. Both are non-profit fund raises, and I donated to this one, because I want to protect all the artifacts. =)
As Rusty summarizes, more eloquently than I, we are at a unique period in human history where we can change the trajectory of the solar system, every so slightly, to preserve life on Earth. What a tragedy it would be to have evolved this far, and not progress to a type 2 civilization.
At our evening event, we debuted a sneak peek of the Infrasound Analysis video. How many 1kT meteorites have hit the Earth since 2000? (These are the ones that hit with 1000 tons of TNT) How many hit Earth that exceed 15kT (> Hiroshima nuclear blast)?
Hmmm…. We know of the Chelyabinsk air burst that blasted 100,000 windows (shooting glass into 1,500 people who went toward the windows when they saw the flash of light that preceded the shock wave). Any others? Well, we’ve been monitoring the low-frequency vibration signal of an underground nuclear weapons test with an array of receivers. Since 2000, there was only one nuclear test, or so we thought, in South Africa, but it turned out to be a meteorite impact. Aha! This sensor array detects meteorite impacts that nobody saw, whether at sea,= or the outback.
So, how many big impacts have we had since 2000? There have been 26. And the largest eight are Hiroshima-class, one of which landed in the Mediterranean, and another barely off the coast of Australia. Scary close for a Hiroshima blast coming in at Mach 50 from the sky gods.
It’s amazing to watch the globe spin as 20 of the 26 hit oceans, without human witnesses. One hit the Australian outback, two hit Northwest Africa, and only three others hit land, including Chelyabinsk.
The conclusion of this research: “Near-Earth object impacts could be about 10 times more common than we thought they were.” (LA Times, 11/6/13)
Here is the B612 site for more info: http://b612foundation.org
If you want to consider a major donation, please ping me, and we can share more details, from science and engineering binders to marketing and educational opportunities as this open data set extends Google Earth to the near-Earth solar system.
Photos by Julie Sparenberg (and Peter Norvig where noted).
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