B612 Foundation Announces SENTINEL Mission
B612 Foundation Announces First Privately Funded Deep Space Mission
“In a press conference at the California Academy of Sciences Thursday morning, the B612 Foundation unveiled its plans to build, launch, and operate the first privately funded deep space mission – SENTINEL – a space telescope to be placed in orbit around the Sun, ranging up to 170 million miles from Earth, for a mission of discovery and mapping.”
Hopefully Planetary Resources is paying attention to this.B612 needs some funding and planetary resources needs a ride for their new telescope(s).
If you put a spectrometer on the Sentinel telescope you might even be able to tell what the asteroids are made from instead of just tracking them.
I’ll be very excited if this really happens, but nothing in this announcement indicates how much money they need to raise or how much they’ve raised so far. That’s a very bad sign. If they had evidence to suggest they really can raise the money to make this happen, I strongly suspect they would trumpet that in their announcement.
A press release that makes it sound like a done deal while purposely avoiding nearly all mention of how much money they currently have and how much they need makes it seem highly unlikely the funding will actually materialize.
Note that there is a competing/complementary project coming out of JPL (neocam.ipac.caltech.edu). It was selected for technology development in the last NASA Discovery mission selection round.
http://blogs.discovermagazi…
Could a falcon 9 or 9 v 1.1. Launch this???
Thanks Mr. Gray
What’s the difference in price from a delta II falcon since these guys would footing their own bill?
It is planned to launch on a Falcon 9, but a Delta II would also work (there are a few left).