Wednesday, October 24, 2012

The Sentinel Space Telescope, your protector in space: starting in 2017.

Asteroid-hunting telescope to launch in 2017 to view an astounding estimated 80,000+ a year for about six years. The plan is being implemented by a nonprofit foundation with former astronaut CEO & Chairan and its partner Ball Aerospace with some assistance from Tom Gavin the former Director for Solar system Exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories.

The plan is to place the Sentinel near the orbit of Venus. From there it is able to better scan what is around Earth without the Sun’s glare making us miss something big. The telescope uses infrared eyes and so is expected to see many more than we have to date. There other ways it would be a help. Only a percentage of the sky is watched. If you think of it the entire sky is cut like pieces of a pie, radial that go out from the earth so that we need to cover a 360 degree space. this telescope will allow not only viewing minus the Sun’s interference, but also exists at a distance so that it is able take it all in, instead of necessitating many telescopes. We can expand our range of checking the skies and have a much larger window should we see one on a direct line to Earth. Larger window means we can mount a deflection mission. Also, when we travel we can know what trajectories to avoid.

Of course the down side is we’ll get warnings ever week at first!

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