An MOU was signed between Dr. Bob Bishop, President and Founder, ICES Foundation, and Dr. Ed Lu, CEO, B612 Foundation, and publicly presented at the ICES Biennial Conference on “Modeling the Whole Earth System—a Challenge Whose Time has come” in Geneva, on November 12, 2013. The purpose of the MOU is to provide the framework to achieve enhanced support for educating policymakers and the general public on the effects of asteroid impacts and the associated hazard reduction and risk mitigation solutions.
“Asteroid impacts have long-term economic, political, and social consequences above and beyond the immediate economic losses,” stated Lu. “We now have the technology and the scientific expertise to identify and track future threats decades in advance and are very pleased to be establishing the international policy framework and discussions to move these efforts forward. Our collaboration with ICES will be instrumental.”
“We very much welcome the opportunity to contribute our expertise to the Sentinel Mission by assisting with the modeling, simulation and visualization of asteroid impacts and by helping to educate policy makers and the general public about the dire economic and environmental consequences of asteroid impacts and other natural hazards”, stated Dr. Bishop.
B612 SENTINEL will find and track 100 times more asteroids than have been found by all other telescopes combined. There are a million asteroids that could present a future threat to humanity, yet all observatories combined to date have detected only about 10,000 or one percent of these potential threats. To be launched in 2018, Sentinel will find the other 99% and create the first dynamic map of the Inner Solar System for exploration and planetary defense.
Dr. G. Scott Hubbard, Stanford University Professor, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Program Architect of the B612 Foundation Sentinel Mission addressed the ICES Biennial Conference on November 12th.
