Non-Profit's Private Space Telescope to Hunt Dangerous Asteroids in 2017
With the dangers of rogue asteroids made clear by the surprise explosion of a meteor over Russia in February, a non-profit organization is ramping up its effort to search for potentially hazardous space rocks near Earth.
To date, about 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids large enough to destroy the entire planet (about 1 kilometer, or 0.6 miles wide) have been discovered, but far fewer of the smaller, city-killing size (roughly 140 meters, or 460 feet, in diameter) have been found.
"We are essentially flying blind in a cosmic shooting gallery," Scott Hubbard, B612 program architect, told reporters on Tuesday (April 9) at the 29th annual National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo.
This reality was starkly illustrated on Feb. 15, when a 55-foot-wide (17 meters) meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, just hours before an asteroid almost three times its size called 2012 DA14 flew uncomfortably close to Earth.
Sentinel's goal is to detect about 90 percent of this city-killing class of asteroids over a period of 6.5 years.
The $450 million mission is to be privately funded, though the foundation has partnered with NASA to share its data and use the agency's Deep Space Network of satellites to facilitate communications between Sentinel and the ground. NASA and lawmakers have said they enthusiastically support the mission and the B612 Foundation's efforts.
"We must better recognize what the private sector can do to aid our efforts to protect the world," Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, said during a Congressional hearing on the asteroid issue Wednesday (April 10).
B612 is also looking to partner with other private organizations, such as the solar system exploration non-profit organization The Planetary Society.
"We are hoping in the future to partner with B612, and we will find the asteroid that could have our name on it," said Bill Nye, the CEO of The Planetary Society. "We will — this sounds extraordinary — we will save humankind. It sounds like science fiction, but it's real."
B612's presentation at the National Space Symposium came one day before the group's CEO, former astronaut Ed Lu, spoke before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Wednesday (April 10) on the importance of searching for potentially dangerous asteroids before they hit Earth.
Sentinel will fly in a Venus-like orbit around the sun, closer in than Earth. The observatory use an infrared telescope to search for space rocks as they near the sun, absorbing some of its light and re-radiating it as heat.
"If we build sophisticated night-vision goggles, we can see it," said John Troeltzsch, program manager for the Sentinel mission at Ball Aerospace, which has been contracted to build the spacecraft.
DARPA Building robots with ‘real’ brains
The next frontier for the robotics industry is to build machines that think like humans. Scientists have pursued that elusive goal for decades, and they believe they are now just inches away from the finish line.
A Pentagon-funded team of researchers has constructed a tiny machine that would allow robots to act independently. Unlike traditional artificial intelligence systems that rely on conventional computer programming, this one “looks and ‘thinks’ like a human brain,” said James K. Gimzewski, professor of chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Gimsewski is a member of the team that has been working under sponsorship of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on a program called “physical intelligence.” This technology could be the secret to making robots that are truly autonomous, Gimzewski said during a conference call hosted by Technolink, a Los Angeles-based industry group.
This project does not use standard robot hardware with integrated circuitry, he said. The device that his team constructed is capable, without being programmed like a traditional robot, of performing actions similar to humans, Gimzewski said.
Participants in this project include Malibu-based HRL (formerly Hughes Research Laborary) and the University of California at Berkeley’s Freeman Laboratory for Nonlinear Neurodynamics. The latter is named after Walter J. Freeman, who has been working for 50 years on a mathematical model of the brain that is based on electroencephalography data. EEG is the recording of electrical activity in the brain.
What sets this new device apart from any others is that it has nano-scale interconnected wires that perform billions of connections like a human brain, and is capable of remembering information, Gimzewski said. Each connection is a synthetic synapse. A synapse is what allows a neuron to pass an electric or chemical signal to another cell. Because its structure is so complex, most artificial intelligence projects so far have been unable to replicate it.
A “physical intelligence” device would not require a human controller the way a robot does, said Gimzewski. The applications of this technology for the military would be far reaching, he said. An aircraft, for example, would be able to learn and explore the terrain and work its way through the environment without human intervention, he said. These machines would be able to process information in ways that would be unimaginable with current computers.
Artificial intelligence research over the past five decades has not been able to generate human-like reasoning or cognitive functions, said Gimzewski. DARPA’s program is the most ambitious he has seen to date. “It’s an off-the-wall approach,” he added.
Studies of the brain have shown that one of its key traits is self-organization. “That seems to be a prerequisite for autonomous behavior,” he said. “Rather than move information from memory to processor, like conventional computers, this device processes information in a totally new way.” This could represent a revolutionary breakthrough in robotic systems, said Gimzewski.
It is not clear, however, that the Pentagon is ready to adopt this technology for weapon systems. The Obama administration’s use of drones in “targeted killings” of terrorist suspects has provoked a backlash and prompted the Pentagon to issue new rules for the use of robotic weapons.
“Autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems shall be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force,” said a Nov. 2012 Defense Department policy statement. Autonomous weapons, the document said, must “complete engagements in a timeframe consistent with commander and operator intentions and, if unable to do so, [must] terminate engagements or seek additional human operator input before continuing the engagement.”
