[SatNews] The world’s first privately funded deep space telescope mission, the B612 Foundation’s SENTINEL MISSION, has announced new support and additions to its Board of Directors, Strategic Advisory Board and increased financial support—keeping the mission on track to launch in July of 2018.
“The third quarter of 2013 was successful for us in many ways, as we received both welcome financial support, including a seven figure contribution, as well as added another wave of highly successful individuals to our team: the Strategic Advisory Board, Founding Circle and Board of Directors,” said Dr. Ed Lu, Co-Founder and CEO of the B612 Foundation. “These are the forward thinkers who are stepping up to ensure the security of our planet. We are very appreciative.”
B612 SENTINEL will find and track 100 times more asteroids than have been found by all other telescopes combined. “Sentinel is in some sense a time-machine that will give us the ability to peer decades into the future to know ahead of time if any of these asteroids will impact Earth” continued Lu. “It does this by accurately measuring the positions and velocities of asteroids. Then by using the laws of orbital mechanics we will calculate the future locations of these asteroids. And with this knowledge we will be able to change the future by deflecting asteroids from hitting our planet.”
The B612 Founding Circle
Among others (who wish to remain anonymous), Dr. Peter Norvig, Google joins the foundation’s largest donors in the B612 Founding Circle. Dr. Norvig, a specialist in artificial intelligence, is Director of Research at Google and formerly Google’s Director of Search Quality and Machine Learning.
B612 Board of Directors has voted to add Dr. David Liddle, Venture Partner at USVP, co-founder of Interval Research Corporation, consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University and credited with heading development of the Xerox Star computer system. He also serves on the Boards of Inphi Corporation and The New York Times Company.
The B612 Foundation Strategic Advisory Board
The role of the Strategic Advisory Board is to shape the thinking of the B612 Leadership Team with constructive input and provide innovative solutions and novel approaches to the Mission. New members include:
- Dr. David Brin, best-selling author, astrophysicist, engineer and philosopher
- Julian Nott, a design engineer, writer and lecturer and founder of the modern ballooning movement, with 79 world ballooning records and 96 British records
- Dr. Brian May, physicist, world-renowned guitarist, songwriter, producer and performer and founding member of Queen
- Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media Inc. Tim is thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world
- Janet Zucker, Zucker Productions. Janet also founded and co-chairs The Science & Entertainment Exchange, working with the National Academy of Sciences to promote positive and accurate science in the media
- Jerry Zucker, Co-producer of Airplane, Top Secret, Naked Gun, Police Squad, Ghost and many well-known films which have defined state-of-the-art comedy for generations of film audiences
