FRANCE: NASA has terminated its 10-year contract with a company hoping to build a spacecraft that would hunt for Earth-threatening asteroids. NASA cited “limited resources” and an inability to further “reserve funds” for the $450 million mission.
The B612 Foundation – the company whose “interplanetary mission” is to build a spacecraft that would track asteroids – signed what is called a Space Act Agreement (SAA) back in 2012.
Under the agreement with NASA, B612 would have been able to obtain NASA’s technical consultation and tracking facilities for Sentinel, if it had been launched. For its part, B612 would inform NASA on the spacecraft’s findings and deliver data from the spacecraft to the Minor Planet Center.
Expected to last 10 years, the contract laid out a number of milestones that the foundation needed to meet.
NASA has confirmed to the website Space Policy Online that the contract has indeed been canceled. The space agency said that B612, which fully relies on philanthropic donations and crowdfunding, has failed to meet one of the “milestones” of the SAA – developing its asteroid-hunting spacecraft Sentinel.
The space agency’s spokesmen Dwayne Brown and Dave Steitz said that the decision was “due to limited resources” and that “NASA can no longer afford to reserve funds” for the project.
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