Planetary Resources is selling off equipment from its headquarters in Redmond, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
In a fresh sign of the financial straits facing Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company will be auctioning off hundreds of items from its headquarters in Redmond, Wash., ranging from industrial-strength CNC machine tools and 3-D printers to laptops and folding chairs.
“We are preparing to sell some equipment that we’ve identified as not currently needed and easily replaceable,” Chris Lewicki, Planetary Resources’ president, CEO and chief asteroid miner, told GeekWire in an email. “This is a result of reducing overhead as we go forward with our smaller team.”
A mosaic of images from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft shows a prominent mound of bright material on the western side of Cerealia Facula on dwarf planet Ceres. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA Photo)
The once-mysterious bright spots shining on the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres are getting their closest close-ups from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, adding to the strangest sights of the solar system.
This week, NASA released a mosaic of images captured on June 22 from a height of 22 miles, showing mounds of the white stuff at the center of Occator Crater. Dawn’s current close-up orbit will serve as the last act of a scientific saga that began with its launch more than a decade ago and featured visits to Ceres and Vesta, the two biggest objects in the main asteroid belt.
Ceres’ white spots shone brightly with reflected sunlight in the pictures that Dawn took from millions of miles away, leading some to dub them “alien headlights.” For a time, Dawn’s scientists puzzled over what they were made of. But the probe’s spectral readings confirmed that the material in the bright spots consisted primarily of sodium carbonate.
An artist’s conception shows the Arkyd-301 spacecraft, which was destined to start blazing a trail for asteroid prospecting in 2020. (Planetary Resources Illustration)
It’s been months since Planetary Resources had to scale back its asteroid aspirations because a fundraising campaign came up short — and the quest for cash is continuing as space industry leaders converge on the Seattle area this week for the Space Frontier Foundation’s annual NewSpace conference.
So how long will the quest continue?
“I don’t think there’s a definitive answer to that,” Chris Lewicki, the Redmond, Wash.-based venture’s CEO, president and chief asteroid miner, told GeekWire today.
But Lewicki said Planetary Resources, which has raised more than $50 million in investments and successfully sent twosatellites into orbit over the course of six years, isn’t swerving from its goal of mining near-Earth asteroids to build a trillion-dollar industry.
A series of pictures from Japan’s Hayabusa 2 probe shows views of the asteroid Ryugu during the spacecraft’s approach. The closest views were captured from a distance of about 100 kilometers (62 miles), and reveal craters and boulders on the asteroid’s turning surface. (JAXA Photos)
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a dumpling … It’s a “Star Trek” Borg cube … It’s the asteroid Ryugu!
Our view of Ryugu, a half-mile-wide space rock nearly 180 million miles from Earth, is coming into sharper focus with the approach of the Japanese probe Hayabusa 2.
Three and a half years after its launch, the spacecraft is now within 35 miles of the asteroid, closing in on what’s expected to be a standoff orbital distance of 12 miles. The pictures that it’s been sending back throughout the approach provide enough detail to reveal Ryugu’s blocky shape.
NASA is planning missions to study how to divert a threatening asteroid, including an experiment known as DART, or Double Asteroid Redirection Test. (NASA Illustration)
The White House has issued an updated plan that lays out the roles played by NASA and other federal agencies in anticipating threats from near-Earth objects — and makes clear that if a threat arises, America will address it alone if need be to protect its national interests.
For now, the top priority is to detect and keep track of near-Earth objects, or NEOs, with NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observation Program playing the lead role.
Nathan Myhrvold shows off a fragment of the Chelyabinsk meteorite in his office at Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)
Nathan Myhrvold is back, and this time he’s got peer review on his side.
Two years ago, the Seattle tech pioneer tangled with NASA and the scientists behind an infrared sky survey mission known as NEOWISE, over a data set that cataloged the characteristics of more than 157,000 asteroids.
In a lengthy assessment, Myhrvold said the NEOWISE team had made flawed and misleading correlations between the brightness and the size of asteroids.
In response, NASA pointed to mistakes in Myhrvold’s critique and noted that his claims hadn’t gone through scientific peer review. “It is important that any paper undergo peer review by an independent journal before it can be seriously considered,” NASA said at the time.
The Asteroid Detection Analysis and Mapping software, or ADAM, can plot the courses of multiple asteroids, as shown in this visualization. (B612 Asteroid Institute via YouTube)
A Silicon Valley institute focusing on the perils and prospects posed by near-Earth objects has chosen its first senior research fellows to work at the University of Washington.
Bryce Bolin and Sarah Greenstreet will work under the direction of the Asteroid Institute’s executive director, Ed Lu, a former NASA astronaut and co-founder of the B612 Foundation.
“The team is growing,” Lu told GeekWire.
Like B612, the Asteroid Institute focuses on the issue of tracking and potentially deflecting asteroids that have a chance of hitting Earth. The institute puts its emphasis on research tools and technologies that can aid in planetary defense.
Lu said Bolin and Greenstreet will help with projects such as B612’s Asteroid Decision Analysis and Mapping project. ADAM has been compared to a Google Maps for solar system objects — which is an apt comparison, considering that Lu worked on Google Maps for a time after leaving NASA in 2007.
The Asteroid Detection Analysis and Mapping software, or ADAM, can plot the courses of multiple asteroids and other celestial bodies, as shown in this visualization. (B612 Asteroid Institute via YouTube)
Google Cloud and AGI (a.k.a. Analytical Graphics Inc.) have gotten on board with the B612 Asteroid Institute to develop a cloud-based platform for keeping track of asteroid discoveries.
The two companies have become technology partners for the Asteroid Decision Analysis and Mapping project, or ADAM, which aims to provide the software infrastructure for analyzing the trajectories of near-Earth objects, identifying potential threats, and sizing up the scenarios for taking action if necessary.
Planetary Resources, a Redmond, Wash.-based venture that aims to make a fortune mining asteroids, is facing a more down-to-earth challenge: a fundraising shortfall.
Just last month, the company had its Arkyd-6 prototype space telescope launched into orbit by an Indian PSLV rocket, and that spacecraft has been undergoing testing.
Arkyd-6 is designed to provide midwave infrared imagery of Earth, as a technological tryout for future asteroid-observing probes.
A spokeswoman for Planetary Resources, Stacey Tearne, told GeekWire that financial challenges have forced the company to focus on leveraging the Arkyd-6 mission for near-term revenue — apparently by selling imagery and data.
“Planetary Resources missed a fundraising milestone,” Tearne explained in an email. “The company remains committed to utilizing the resources from space to further explore space, but is focusingon near-term revenue streams by maximizing the opportunity of having a spacecraft in orbit.”
Tearne said no further information was available, and did not address questions about employment cutbacks. However, reports from other sources in the space community suggest there have been notable job reductions. For what it’s worth, Planetary Resources had more than 70 employees at last report.
