The B612 Sentinel project

Former astronaut "Rusty" Schweickart and other scientific professionals that make up the B612 Foundation who's goal it is to map the roughly one million Earth crossing asteroids that exist in the inner Solar System and possibly pose a threat to Earth. At present we only know of 10 thousand objects. The Sentinal Project, with the aid of the infrared space telescope call Sentinel, hopes to put the telescope into operation in five year time.

Asteroid Mining May Be Against the Law?

Well we may just have jumped the gun on this story. As you recall I wrote about a venture capitol group, consisting of people like James Cameron, wanted to start a company to mine near Earth asteroids for their resources. Now according to BY George Dvorsky writing for the IO9 blog -space law expert Frans von der Dunk warned that current space law is seriously out of date and such ventures may turn out to be illegal! The question of who owns the asteroid and what rights do the miners have should someone consider taking any particular mine as their own. Without clear cut laws, this scenario could be a very real possibility.

From the IO9 Article:

• The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which forms the basis of international space law and to which all space-faring nations are a party. The treaty says that outer space constitutes a "global commons." This means that extraterrestrial bodies can never be part of one country such as the United States

The complete IO9 article can be read here

Image via Gunnar Assmy/Shutterstock

Company Wants to Mine Asteroids!

A Seattle Washington company wants to develop a business that would be centered around asteroid mining.

Planetary Resources, Inc. in a recent press conference stated that they are interested in the long term to "expand Earth's natural resource base" by developing and deploying the technologies for asteroid mining. Although the company's long term is mining asteroids, its initial plans will be the development of a market for small cost-reduced space telescopes for both Earth observation and astronomy.

Of note, James Cameron is listed as an adviser to the project. Cameron as you will remember recently made the historic second only dive on the Challenger deep on which he was the first to do the dive solo.





wikipedia on Planetary Resources

Asteroid collision or .........?

STSI reports that Hubble has captured the first snapshots of a "suspected asteroid collision". The images show a bizarre X-shaped object at the head of a comet-like trail of material.

Excuse me, but this is clearly  a Borg Cube that has been savaged by bushwhacking Federation and Klingon vessels.

Picture source: Space Telescope Science Institute