Nonprofit group proposes asteroid-spotting space mission

Washington Post : To protect Earth from asteroid strikes, the nonprofit B612 Foundation is planning to launch a privately funded deep-space mission by 2017 or 2018. Sentinel, a space telescope that will orbit around the Sun at about the distance of Venus, will use its IR camera to look for asteroids large enough to pose a danger to Earth. Such early warning would allow time to prepare a mission to deal with the potential hazard. To cover the projected cost of the telescopeâmdash;"a few hundred million dollars,” according to B612’s websiteâmdash;the foundation is accepting donations. “This is crowdsourcing but on a grand level,” said physicist Ed Lu, one of B612’s founders. Sentinel isn’t the first privately funded deep-space missionâmdash;that honor goes to Planetary Resources, which in April announced an ambitious project to build space-based telescopes to seek and mine asteroidsâmdash;but it is the first to specifically have a nonprofit motive.