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Planetary Resource Kickstarts Search for Alien Planets

The asteroid mining venture has added another wrinkle to its project to crowd-fund a high-powered Arkyd space telescope to hunt for near-Earth objects.

June 12, 2013
Arkyd Space Telescope

Asteroid mining venture Planetary Resources this week added another wrinkle to its Kickstarter for a crowd-funded, high-powered space telescope that will hunt for near-Earth objects (NEOs). It promised to use excess funds to launch a search for alien worlds as well.

Last month, Planetary Resources initiated a Kickstarter campaign to build and launch "the world's first crowd-funded space telescope" using its own Arkyd spacecraft. The private space company was looking to raise $1 million towards that goal and said Wednesday that it has already achieved 85 percent with 19 days remaining in the campaign.

Now Planetary Resources wants potential backers to know that if it manages to pull in $2 million or more before the original Kickstarter campaign ends, it "will invest the additional funds to enhance the Arkyd space telescope technology to enable it to search for alien planets."

Chris Lewicki, president and chief engineer of Planetary Resources, said some dedicated upgrades to the planned Arkyd-100 space telescope would "add exoplanet transit detection capability by enhancing the telescope's stability systems and dedicating time to monitor candidate star systems."

"While the Arkyd won't rival NASA's $600 million Kepler spacecraft, which may have to end its mission due to a recent equipment failure, the enhanced Arkyd will be a huge step toward important new scientific discoveries enabled by citizen scientists," Lewicki said in a statement.

A "special bonus" to adding exoplanet-hunting capabilities to the Arkyd is that the enhanced telescope would also be better at measuring the spin properties of asteroids, according to Planetary Resources.

"We're excited about this game-changing approach that could transform how we do science in the future. It's not just about advanced technology in a small satellite, but a crowd-funded approach to space science that could be revolutionary," said Prof. Sara Seager of MIT, a leading exoplanet scientist consulting with Planetary Resources on the development of its exoplanet research program.

Planetary Resources, co-founded in 2009 by Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson, was officially taken out of stealth mode last April with a host of celebrity backers and advisors, including Google CEO Larry Page, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, and film director James Cameron.

Last year, Anderson revealed that Planetary Resources had already started developing spacecraft for the first phase of its asteroid-mining venture. That line of low-orbit robotic probes has been dubbed the Arkyd-100 Series and will be followed on with future-generation Arkyd spacecraft that will visit likely asteroid candidates for prospecting purposes and eventually be deployed to mine them for materials theoretically worth billions and even trillions of dollars.

For more on Planetary Resources, check out PCMag's recent interview with Diamandis.

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About Damon Poeter

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Damon Poeter

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.

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