Skip to content
Sign in
Artwork for Star Stuff
Star Stuff · Tuesday · 37 min

Saving the World with Dr. Ed Lu

When retired NASA astronaut Dr. Ed Lu co-founded B612 Foundation, he and the rest of the team asked themselves one question: “Can we raise $400 million to save the world?” The world in question is ours, and the threat is the asteroids that share our neighborhood of the solar system. B612 set out to find them before they find us, and that takes a rare mix of engineering ambition, scientific rigor, and a willingness to ask for a very large amount of money. In this episode, Historian Kevin Schindler and planetary astronomer Dr. Nick Moskovitz sit down with Ed to talk about his spearheading of the Sentinel Mission, an infrared space telescope built to orbit the Sun and map roughly 500,000 hazardous near-Earth asteroids.

0:00-37:04
Play in

transcript

No transcript — this publisher did not publish one.

show notes

When retired NASA astronaut Dr. Ed Lu co-founded B612 Foundation, he and the rest of the team asked themselves one question: “Can we raise $400 million to save the world?”

The world in question is ours, and the threat is the asteroids that share our neighborhood of the solar system. B612 set out to find them before they find us, and that takes a rare mix of engineering ambition, scientific rigor, and a willingness to ask for a very large amount of money.

In this episode, Historian Kevin Schindler and planetary astronomer Dr. Nick Moskovitz sit down with Ed to talk about his spearheading of the Sentinel Mission, an infrared space telescope built to orbit the Sun and map roughly 500,000 hazardous near-Earth asteroids.

more episodes

All episodes