Tag: Asteroids

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Planetary Resources misses goal and trims jobs

Image: Arkyd 6
An artist’s conception shows Planetary Resources’ Arkyd-6 satellite. (Credit: Planetary Resources)

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 focusing on 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.

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Asteroid miners might need applied astronomers

Planetary Resources asteroid
An artist’s conception shows a long-range view of mining robots working on an asteroid. (Planetary Resources Illustration)

AUSTIN, Texas — Mining asteroids for water and other resources could someday become a trillion-dollar business, but not without astronomers to point the way.

At least that’s the view of Martin Elvis, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who’s been taking a close look at the science behind asteroid mining.

If the industry ever takes off the way ventures such as Redmond, Wash.-based Planetary Resources and California-based Deep Space Industries hope, “that opens up new employment opportunities for astronomers,” Elvis said today in Austin at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Is weird object a starship? Scientists will check

'Oumuamua
An artist’s conception shows what the interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua might look like. (ESO Illustration / M. Kornmesser)

Is that cigar-shaped, fast-moving interstellar object a spaceship? Almost certainly not, but Breakthrough Listen will check just to make sure.

The Breakthrough Listen campaign, which checks celestial targets for radio signals from intelligent civilizations, will turn the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia toward the object, known as ‘Oumuamua, starting Dec. 13.

Scientists will check for emissions across four radio bands from 1 to 12 GHz. The first phase of observations will take up 10 hours, divided into four key time periods based on ‘Oumuamua’s period of rotation.

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It’s confirmed: Interstellar asteroid is an oddball

'Oumuamua
An artist’s conception shows what the interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua might look like. (ESO Illustration / M. Kornmesser)

Scientists say the interstellar asteroid known as ‘Oumuamua is like nothing that’s been seen in the solar system before, with an “extreme oblong shape” that’s as much as 10 times as long as it is wide. The details are laid out in a paper published today by the journal Nature.

Nature’s authors say ‘Oumuamua is relatively dense, possibly with high metal content, lacks significant amounts of water or ice, and shows no signs of dust. They estimate its length to be at least 1,300 feet (400 meters), which is longer than previous estimates.

The size estimate is based on how the light reflected by the object varied over the course of a roughly 7.3-hour rotation period. No direct observations of ‘Oumuamua’s shape could be made, but one can only imagine what conspiracy theorists might come up with.

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Planetary Resources’ next satellite is ready to fly

Arkyd-6 prepared
Workers prepare Planetary Resources’ Arkyd-6 technology demonstrator satellite for shipment at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash. (Planetary Resources via YouTube)

Planetary Resources has been working on its Arkyd-6 imaging satellite for years, and today the company reported that the printer-sized spacecraft has finally begun its journey to an Indian launch pad.

Arkyd-6 is considered a technology trailblazer for the asteroid-observing probes that Planetary Resources plans to build at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash.

The company’s first demonstrator satellite, the Arkyd-3R, was deployed from the International Space Station’s Kibo airlock in 2015. The Arkyd-6 is twice as big, and is expected to provide Earth imagery in the midwave infrared slice of the electromagnetic spectrum.

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NASA shows off OSIRIS-REx’s snapshot of Earth

OSIRIS-REx view of Earth
This color composite image of Earth was taken by the MapCam camera on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on Sept. 22, just hours after the spacecraft completed its Earth gravity assist maneuver at a range of about 106,000 miles. (NASA GSFC / Univ. of Arizona Photo)

During last week’s flyby, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft captured a stunning portrait of Earth’s disk, spanning the Pacific from Australia to America’s West Coast.

The color composite image, created from readings that were captured on Sept. 22 while the asteroid probe zoomed past at an altitude of 106,000 miles, was released by NASA and the University of Arizona today.

You can make out Australia at lower left, and the southwestern U.S. at upper right.

The photo op arose because OSIRIS-REx’s mission navigators took advantage of Earth’s gravitational field to slingshot the 20-foot-wide probe toward the asteroid Bennu, which it’s due to reach in late 2018.

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Asteroid probe buzzes Earth as its fans watch

OSIRIS-REx flyby
Artwork shows NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft passing by Earth. (NASA GSFC / Univ. of Arizona)

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft took pictures — and had its picture taken — as it zoomed past Earth today on its way to the asteroid Bennu.

The close encounter served as much more than a photo op: OSIRIS-REx’s gravity-assist maneuver was an essential part of its trajectory toward Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid that’s currently more than 31 million miles away.

OSIRIS-REx came as close as 10,711 miles to Earth at 9:52 a.m. PT, blazing over Antarctica at a relative speed of 19,000 mph. That’s so close that NASA had to take care to make sure the 20-foot-wide spacecraft didn’t hit any orbiting satellites.

The maneuver boosted OSIRIS-REx’s speed and shifted its course to put it on track to rendezvous with the 1,650-foot-wide asteroid in late 2018.

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Science educator celebrates his asteroid

Dennis Schatz
Dennis Schatz is senior adviser at the Pacific Science Center. (Dennis Schatz via Amazon.com)

The Pacific Science Center’s senior adviser, Dennis Schatz, has achieved a kind of fame that so far has eluded the likes of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates: getting his name on an asteroid.

Asteroid Schatz joins more than 20,000 other “minor planets” that have been named after people, places and things. That represents only a small percentage of the more than 734,000 such objects that have been cataloged by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.

It’s generally up to an asteroid’s discoverer to propose a name for approval by the IAU, in accordance with a set of naming rules. (For example, no dictators need apply.) On occasion, the Minor Planet Center takes requests.

In Schatz’s case, it was Larry Wasserman, a planetary scientist at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, who suggested the name. Asteroid 25232, previously known as 1998 TN33, was discovered in 1998 by the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth Object Search, or LONEOS.

Wasserman cited Schatz’s status as an astronomer and educator who was vice president of the Pacific Science Center, president and workshop leader for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the author of 23 children’s books on science, and co-developer of educational programs such as Project ASTRO and Portal to the Public.

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Why asteroids loom as future space frontier

Asteroid mining
In this artist’s conception, a mining spacecraft makes a rendezvous with an asteroid. (SpaceResources.lu)

It’s been 55 years since satellite communications became the first commercial space frontier, and space tourism is looming as the next frontier. But what comes after that? Would you believe in-space mining and manufacturing?

Those are the opportunities that came to the fore on July 29 when members of the Association of Professional Futurists gathered at Seattle’s Museum of Flight.

“The big change that I foresee is when we begin to live and work on the asteroids, using them as the resources for our civilization. … We are going to see a leap in productivity to create wealth and to allow us to do things without harming the Earth,” said Brian Tillotson, who is the systems technology chief engineer for Boeing Research and Technology and a Boeing senior technical fellow (as well as a science-fiction writer).

“It’s going to be much bigger than the industrial revolution, and this time it’s going to be good for the Earth, not bad for the Earth,” Tillotson said.

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Asteroid miners hail Luxembourg’s new law

Lawmakers in the tiny European country of Luxembourg today approved a measure affirming that space resources can be privately owned. The law, adopted nearly unanimously by Luxembourg’s parliament, also sets up procedures for authorizing and supervising space exploration missions. It will go into force on Aug. 1. Planetary Resources – which is headquartered in Redmond, Wash., but has a Luxembourg-based subsidiary – hailed today’s action as further evidence of the nation’s status as a global leader in the space resources sector.

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