Neil Degrasse Tyson Gregory Mone Popular Books

Neil Degrasse Tyson Gregory Mone Biography & Facts

The B612 Foundation is a private nonprofit foundation headquartered in Mill Valley, California, United States, dedicated to planetary science and planetary defense against asteroids and other near-Earth object (NEO) impacts. It is led mainly by scientists, former astronauts and engineers from the Institute for Advanced Study, Southwest Research Institute, Stanford University, NASA and the space industry. As a non-governmental organization it has conducted two lines of related research to help detect NEOs that could one day strike the Earth, and find the technological means to divert their path to avoid such collisions. It also assisted the Association of Space Explorers in helping the United Nations establish the International Asteroid Warning Network, as well as a Space Missions Planning Advisory Group to provide oversight on proposed asteroid deflection missions. In 2012, the foundation announced it would design and build a privately financed asteroid-finding space observatory, the Sentinel Space Telescope, to be launched in 2017–2018. Once stationed in a heliocentric orbit around the Sun similar to that of Venus, Sentinel's supercooled infrared detector would have helped identify dangerous asteroids and other NEOs that pose a risk of collision with Earth. In the absence of substantive planetary defense provided by governments worldwide, B612 attempted a fundraising campaign to cover the Sentinel Mission, estimated at $450 million for 10 years of operation. Fundraising was unsuccessful, and the program was cancelled in 2017, with the Foundation pursuing a constellation of smaller satellites instead. The B612 Foundation is named for the asteroid home of the eponymous hero of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's 1943 book The Little Prince. Background When an asteroid enters the planet's atmosphere it becomes known as a 'meteor'; those that survive and fall to the Earth's surface are then called 'meteorites'. While basketball-sized meteors occur almost daily, and compact car-sized ones about yearly, they usually burn up or explode high above the Earth as bolides, (fireballs), often with little notice. During an average 24-hour period, the Earth sweeps through some 100 million particles of interplanetary dust and pieces of cosmic debris, only a very minor amount of which arrives on the ground as meteorites. The larger in size asteroids or other near-Earth objects (NEOs) are, the less frequently they impact the planet's atmosphere—large meteors seen in the skies are extremely rare, while medium-sized ones are less so, and much smaller ones are more commonplace. Although stony asteroids often explode high in the atmosphere, some objects, especially iron-nickel meteors and other types descending at a steep angle, can explode close to ground level or even directly impact onto land or sea. In the U.S. State of Arizona, the 1,200-metre-wide (3,900 ft) Meteor Crater (officially named Barringer Crater) formed in a fraction of a second as nearly 160 million tonnes of limestone and bedrock were uplifted, creating its crater rim on formerly flat terrain. The asteroid that produced the Barringer Crater was only about 46 metres (151 ft) in size; however it impacted the ground at a velocity of 12.8 km/s (29,000 mph) and struck with an impact energy of 10 megatonnes of TNT (42 PJ)—about 625 times greater than the bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima during World War II. Tsunamis can also occur after a medium-sized or larger asteroid impacts an ocean surface or other large body of water. The probability of a mid-sized asteroid (similar to the one that destroyed the Tunguska River area of Russia in 1908) hitting Earth during the 21st century has been estimated at 30%. Since the Earth is currently more populated than in previous eras, there is a greater risk of large casualties arising from a mid-sized asteroid impact. However, as of the early 2010s, only about a half of one per cent of Tunguska-type NEOs had been located by astronomers using ground-based telescope surveys. The need for an asteroid detection program has been compared to the need for monsoon, typhoon, and hurricane preparedness. As the B612 Foundation and other organizations have publicly noted, of the different types of natural catastrophes that can occur on our planet, asteroid strikes are the only one that the world now has the technical capability to prevent. B612 is one of several organizations to propose detailed dynamic surveys of NEOs and preventative measures such as asteroid deflection. Other groups include Chinese researchers, NASA in the United States, NEOShield in Europe, as well as the international Spaceguard Foundation. In December 2009 Roscosmos Russian Federal Space Agency director Anatoly Perminov proposed a deflection mission to the 325-metre-wide (1,066 ft) asteroid 99942 Apophis, which at the time had been thought to pose a risk of collision with Earth. Asteroid deflection workshop The Foundation evolved from an informal one-day workshop on asteroid deflection strategies during October 2001, organized by Dutch astrophysicist Piet Hut along with physicist and then-U.S. astronaut Ed Lu, presented at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Twenty researchers participated, principally from various NASA facilities plus the non-profit Southwest Research Institute, but as well from the University of California, University of Michigan, and the Institute for Independent Study. All were interested in contributing to the proposed creation of an asteroid deflection capability. The seminar participants included Rusty Schweickart, a former Apollo astronaut, and Clark Chapman, a planetary scientist. Among the proposed experimental research missions discussed were the alteration of an asteroid's spin rate, as well as changing the orbit of one part of a binary asteroid pair. Following the seminar's round-table discussions the workshop generally agreed that the vehicle of choice (needed to deflect an asteroid) would be powered by a low-thrust ion plasma engine. Landing a nuclear-powered plasma engined pusher vehicle on the asteroid's surface was seen as promising, an early proposal that would later encounter a number of technical obstacles. Nuclear explosives were seen as "too risky and unpredictable" for several reasons, warranting the view that gently altering an asteroid's trajectory was the safest approach—but also a method requiring years of advance warning to successfully accomplish. B612 Project and Foundation The October 2001 asteroid deflection workshop participants created the "B612 Project" to further their research. Schweickart, along with Drs. Hut, Lu and Chapman, then formed the B612 Foundation on October 7, 2002, with its first goal being to "significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner". Schweickart became an early public face of the foundation and served as chairman on its board of directors. In 2010, as part of an ad hoc task force on planetary defense, .... Discover the Neil Degrasse Tyson Gregory Mone popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Neil Degrasse Tyson Gregory Mone books.