Date: August 22nd, 2012

Title: The Sentinel Mission: Avoiding the Fate of Dinosaurs

Podcaster: Roz Brown & John Troeltzsch

Organization: Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.

Links : www.ballaerospace.com ; http://b612foundation.org/

Description: Sentinel is a deep-space mission led by the B612 Foundation. The B612 Foundation is working with Ball Aerospace to design and build the Sentinel Infrared (IR) Space Telescope to create a map of the inner solar system to characterize hazard analysis, orbit determinations and threat assessments.

Bio: Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. develops and manufactures spacecraft, advanced instruments and sensors, components, data exploitation systems and RF solutions for strategic, tactical and scientific applications. The B612 Foundation, a 501(c) 3 organization, is comprised of a group of scientists and explorers whose goal is to build, launch, and operate the first privately funded deep space mission.  John Troeltzsch is the Ball Aerospace program manager for the Sentinel mission. Roz Brown is the Media Relations Manager for Ball Aerospace.

Today’s Sponsor: This episode of “365 days of Astronomy” is sponsored by iTelescope.net – Expanding your horizons in astronomy today. The premier on-demand telescope network, at dark sky sites in Spain, New Mexico and Siding Spring, Australia.

Transcript:

Brown: I’m Roz Brown.  We’re here today to talk about the Sentinel Mission and Ball Aerospace’s involvement in that mission. With me today is John Troeltzsch, Ball Aerospace’s program manager for the Sentinel Mission. John, let’s start at the beginning. The Sentinel Mission is brand new – what is it all about?

Troeltzsch: Sentinel’s purpose is to find asteroids that are in the inner part of the solar system that might pose a threat to Earth.  And you might ask, don’t we know where all these asteroids are? We really don’t. The inner solar system is a very hard place to look.  It’s close to the sun and all our telescopes on Earth have trouble seeing in that vicinity. So, the idea behind Sentinel is to take an infrared telescope and put it into a Venus-like orbit – an orbit that’s at the same distance from the sun as Venus – and look outward away from the sun – and from that vantage point we’ll be able to detect all these asteroids that at this point are unknown. The models the astronomers use say there could be up to a million asteroids out there and we only know of about 9,000.  So, we know there’s a bunch of them.  We just don’t know where they are and where they’re moving and Sentinel’s job is to go find them.

Brown: O.K., So what is Ball Aerospace’s role on this mission?

Troeltzsch:  Ball is really doing the entire mission. We are going to design the telescope and the spacecraft, we’re going to build it with the help of our wonderful suppliers – where we go out and buy pieces that go into the system – and then we’re going to put it together, test it to make sure it will work in the rigors of deep space, launch it and operate it for five-and-a-half years. So really, we’re involved in the very beginning to the very end of the mission.

Brown: O.K. So, let’s say we have this map together, what are we going to do with the map?

Troeltzsch: The map is not something we’re going to get in a day or a week. It really will take five-and-a-half years to put the map together. But as we observe the asteroids, and in a lot of cases we’ll observe them multiple times, we’ll get better and better orbits for them.  Once you have their orbits, you’ll be able to predict where they’ll be at a certain point in time and in particular, will they get close to the Earth or would they even impact the Earth. So, instead of thinking of it as a wall map, think of it as a dynamic map because all these things are moving and this will allow us to predict where they will be in the future. Now, let’s say you find one that poses a threat to the Earth – now you’ve got the opportunity years in advance to send a mission out or a spacecraft out to help deflect it, so it wouldn’t hit the Earth.

Brown:  John, this mission is being lead by the B612 Foundation.  Tell us a about that.

Troeltzsch:  B612 is led by two astronauts. One of the astronauts, Rusty Schweickart orbited the moon as part of the Apollo program, and during that mission he was able to look at the Earth and developed this amazing desire to help protect the Earth because he had seen how fragile it is from space. The other astronaut who’s involved in the B612 Foundation is Ed Lu.  Ed has flown on the space shuttle twice and lived on the space station for six months.  So here are two people who’ve actually been able to leave the Earth and have a really unique perspective on the Earth.  So they founded the B612 Foundation.  You might be asking yourself, “What is B612?”  B612 was the asteroid that the little boy lived on in the children’s book, The Little Prince. So, there’s a literary reference and that’s where B612 comes from.

Brown:  So it’s important that we locate these near-Earth objects that might be a threat to Earth?

Troetzsch:  That’s right, Roz.  It’s interesting that if the dinosaurs had had the knowledge of where the asteroids were going to be and the technology to build a spaceship to go move them, the dinosaurs would still be here today and we wouldn’t be. I’ve spent the last five years working on the Kepler mission, and the wonderful thing about Kepler is that it has found on the order of 2,000 planets around other stars in our galaxy.  If you envision these planets forming the way the Earth formed in our solar system they would each experience the possibility of an asteroid impacting that planet.  Now, if there was a civilization on that planet and they were able to detect a possible collision and prevent it – they could save their civilization from an asteroid impact. So, here we are, living on planet Earth and we now have the technology to find these things and we have the technology to potentially deflect them so we’ve crossed a boundary in the evolution of civilization to where we can actually help control our environment to help protect our species. And I believe there’s other life out there on some of these planets that Kepler has found – but it’s kind of an interesting test – an important test for a civilization. And every civilization that’s in a planetary system has this test at some point in its evolution.

Brown:  I’ve heard some people say, why do it now?  Because we can? Why is this a good time to do it?

Troeltzsch:  The key for asteroid detection or producing this map is to give yourself a lot of time in case there’s a problem with a potential impact in the future. If we find an asteroid and it’s a day out or two days out or even six months out, there’s very little mankind can do to help protect the Earth.  But if you find it, and you find it 30 years away from the impact, you’ve got a lot of time to change its course. So, you want to find them early and you want to take corrective action a long time in the future before it becomes a real danger to the Earth.

Brown: Wow. This is really an ambitious project.  How are we going to pay for this? What’s the funding on this?

Troeltzsch:  Sentinel is a lot of fun because it is so different from anything anyone has ever done.  It’s a privately-funded deep space mission. Traditionally this has been the area where government has come in and had a big mission.  And what’s interesting is that we’re at a point where we can start moving from a government-based mission to a privately funded mission. Twenty years ago that would have been very hard do, but Sentinel relies on technology that we’ve worked on with NASA for the past 15 to 20 years.  You wouldn’t want to do a mission like Sentinel on private funds if there was a lot of risk or a lot of new technology development. But since we’ve been working so closely with NASA on the same technologies we need for Sentinel, we’re now in a position where you can privately fund this, and de-couple it from the government. We’re going to share all the data with both the U.S. government as well as the people of the world so we’re not trying to get a private catalogue of asteroids – we’re really doing this for the good of humanity – but we’re doing it in a way that’s different from any deep space mission that’s ever been done before.

Brown:  Terrific.  What’s our timeframe?  Can’t wait to get it on orbit!

Troeltzsch: Sentinel is a very complicated machine and typically it will take about four years to design, manufacture, test, and launch a system like this so we’re just starting on that adventure at this point. Once it’s built, it’s going to operate for five-and-a-half years.

Brown: As the program manager, it sounds like you’re excited?”

Troeltzsch: Sentinel is a great mission.  I just love the complexity that comes with a mission like this.  You have to have a really passionate team and that requires a great goal or vision about what you’re doing and Sentinel is one of the best I’ve seen. The idea that maybe you could help save a city at some point is a really cool mission to work on. Sentinel also involves a lot of good technology.  It’s an infrared telescope, very sensitive and we love challenges like that here at Ball Aerospace. When you couple the vision with this moral imperative to help protect the planet, you really put together a great chemistry to motivate people and have fun every day you come to work. One of the other things about Sentinel that’s unique is that anyone can get involved with this mission. A lot of the things we do, it’s off  somewhere or the government is doing it, but Sentinel is privately funded so anybody out there that feels this is a passionate thing to do, a good thing to do and worthwhile, can get involved.  You can follow us on our website, you can follow the program as it develops and you can even contribute and help be part of it that way. We want to embrace and involve as many people as possible in this mission.

Brown:  To learn more about the Sentinel Mission go to: www.B612foundation.org

Thanks, John.

Troeltzsch:  Thank you, Roz.  I look forward to talking to you more in the future about the Sentinel Mission and I encourage everyone to follow our progress.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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