Asteroid-Hunting Private Telescope ‘Sentinel’ Could Find 500,000 Space Rocks A private deep-space telescope will find 500,000 near-Earth asteroids in less than six years of operation, its builders say. That may sound ambitious, especially since only about 10,000 such asteroids have been catalogued to date. But the Sentinel space telescope, which is slated to launch into orbit around the sun in five years or so, can deliver the goods, according to its mission team. “We’ll find about a half a million,” said former NASA astronaut Ed Lu, chairman and CEO of the nonprofit B612 Foundation, the group behind the Sentinel project. “This is going to be the definitive map of the inner solar system.”

Asteroid-Hunting Private Telescope ‘Sentinel’ Could Find 500,000 Space Rocks

A private deep-space telescope will find 500,000 near-Earth asteroids in less than six years of operation, its builders say.

That may sound ambitious, especially since only about 10,000 such asteroids have been catalogued to date. But the Sentinel space telescope, which is slated to launch into orbit around the sun in five years or so, can deliver the goods, according to its mission team.

“We’ll find about a half a million,” said former NASA astronaut Ed Lu, chairman and CEO of the nonprofit B612 Foundation, the group behind the Sentinel project. “This is going to be the definitive map of the inner solar system.”