What Is the B612 Foundation and What Is Its Current Status?

Key Takeaways

• B612 remains active in 2026, centered on software, data, research, and planetary defense.
• Its Asteroid Institute operates ADAM, an expanding platform for asteroid analysis and discovery.
• The canceled Sentinel telescope gave way to computational tools that complement government surveys.

How the B612 Foundation Began and Why It Changed Direction

On June 23, 2026, the B612 Foundation announced the recipients of its 2026 Schweickart Prize, direct evidence that the organization remains active nearly 24 years after its creation. B612 is a United States-based nonprofit devoted to developing technologies that help humanity understand, map, and navigate the solar system, with asteroid discovery and planetary defense remaining central to its mission.

The organization emerged in 2002 from discussions among scientists and astronauts concerned about humanity’s ability to identify asteroids that might eventually strike Earth. Former NASA astronaut Ed Lu and Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart became prominent figures associated with the organization. The name B612 comes from the fictional asteroid inhabited by the title character in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.

B612’s early public identity centered heavily on asteroid deflection. The premise was straightforward: an asteroid can potentially be diverted if it is discovered early enough and its orbit can be calculated accurately enough. Detection and long-term tracking consequently became inseparable from planetary defense, the set of activities intended to discover potentially hazardous objects, determine whether they pose a collision risk, and prepare methods for changing their trajectories when necessary.

The organization attracted much greater attention after announcing the Sentinel Space Telescope initiative in 2012. B612 proposed placing an infrared telescope in a solar orbit interior to Earth’s orbit, giving the spacecraft a favorable geometry for finding near-Earth asteroids. The organization intended to finance, build, launch, and operate Sentinel privately, an unusually ambitious approach to deep-space astronomy at the time.

Sentinel never reached space. Raising enough private money to build and operate a dedicated deep-space observatory proved difficult. NASA also terminated the non-reimbursable Space Act Agreement associated with Sentinel. By 2019, B612 itself was referring publicly to the project as the canceled Sentinel mission.

The loss of Sentinel did not end B612’s technical program. The organization gradually shifted from financing a dedicated observing spacecraft toward developing software capable of extracting more information from astronomical observations collected by existing and future observatories. That change eventually produced a substantially different organization.

The Asteroid Institute was created in 2017 as B612’s principal scientific and technical program. Instead of attempting to duplicate the large observatories being developed by governments and research institutions, the institute concentrated on computational methods, orbit determination, cloud processing, archival searches, and tools that help researchers analyze enormous datasets.

That strategy has become more relevant as government planetary-defense capabilities have expanded. NASA demonstrated an asteroid-deflection technique with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory began its decade-long sky survey in June 2026. NASA is also developing the infrared NEO Surveyor spacecraft.

Against that backdrop, B612 occupies a narrower but identifiable position. It is no longer trying to create an independent end-to-end asteroid-detection system. Its present role is closer to that of a specialized nonprofit research and software organization that complements government observatories, scientific institutions, and international asteroid-monitoring infrastructure.

What the B612 Foundation Does in 2026

The B612 Foundation’s technical work in 2026 operates mainly through the Asteroid Institute. The institute brings together software engineers, astronomers, researchers, and collaborators working on asteroid discovery, orbital calculations, impact probabilities, archival observation recovery, astrodynamics, and spacecraft trajectory analysis.

B612 President Danica Remy continues to lead the foundation. Dr. Edward Lu serves as executive director and principal investigator of the Asteroid Institute. The current Asteroid Institute team also includes University of Washington researcher Mario Jurić, head of software engineering Alec Koumjian, researcher Joachim Moeyens, and software and astrodynamics specialists.

The organization’s technical centerpiece is the Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping platform, generally called ADAM. ADAM provides a computational environment for asteroid discovery, orbital analysis, impact-risk calculations, mission planning, and related astrodynamics applications.

B612 moved ADAM from a research platform toward a publicly accessible service in October 2025 when the Asteroid Institute deployed the ADAM Online Platform. Researchers, mission planners, and other users gained access to Precovery, Impact Probability, and Trajectory Optimizer services through an online portal and application programming interface.

The organization’s principal activities can be summarized as follows.

Several ADAM services address work that occurs after observatories collect images. Its Precovery service searches historical datasets for earlier observations of known or suspected objects. Finding an asteroid in older images can extend the period over which astronomers have measured its motion, often improving orbital calculations and reducing uncertainty.

The Impact Probability service allows users to examine possible Earth encounters using orbit simulations. The Trajectory Optimizer supports analysis of spacecraft transfers between planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft.

In May 2026, B612 expanded the platform with ADAM::Ephemeris, a hosted service for computing the predicted positions of asteroids, comets, and other small bodies. The service operates on Google Cloud, uses the institute’s open-source adam-core library, and is available through both the ADAM Online Platform and a programmatic interface.

Ephemeris calculations have many applications. Researchers can determine where an asteroid should appear in the sky, plan follow-up observations, assess whether a target should have appeared in archived images, or determine whether a predicted object will be bright enough for a particular observatory to detect.

These functions place B612 in the information-processing layer of planetary defense. Telescopes produce observations. The Minor Planet Center collects and distributes observational and orbital information concerning minor planets and comets. Computational systems then help researchers connect observations, refine orbits, estimate future positions, and examine possible encounters.

How the Asteroid Institute and ADAM Work

Traditional asteroid discovery often depends on detecting a moving point of light in several images close enough together in time for software or astronomers to identify a consistent motion pattern. Historical astronomical archives contain billions of observations that were never linked to recognized asteroid orbits.

The Asteroid Institute has concentrated heavily on extracting additional discoveries from those archives.

One of its most significant technologies is Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery, abbreviated THOR. Developed through work involving Asteroid Institute researchers and the University of Washington’s DiRAC Institute, THOR tests possible heliocentric orbits against observations and searches for detections that could belong to the same physical object even when conventional groups of closely spaced observations are unavailable.

In April 2024, the Asteroid Institute and Google Cloud announced that they had used THOR running on ADAM to identify approximately 27,500 high-confidence asteroid discovery candidates from historical astronomical data. The analysis processed billions of detections rather than depending on observations collected by a new B612 telescope.

Most candidates were main-belt asteroids. The project also identified more than 100 near-Earth asteroid candidates, along with other classes of small solar-system bodies. Candidate discoveries require review and processing through established astronomical procedures before becoming accepted catalog entries.

The work used the NOIRLab Source Catalog Data Release 2, which contains measurements derived predominantly from observations taken by the Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco 4-meter telescope in Chile. ADAM and THOR searched those existing data for relationships that earlier processing had not recognized.

New Space Economy’s coverage of the project illustrates the wider significance of cloud computing in astronomical research. The B612 project used Google Kubernetes Engine, BigQuery, and Cloud Storage to manage and process very large observational datasets.

The result demonstrated the central idea behind B612’s post-Sentinel direction. Increasing asteroid-discovery capability does not always require collecting new photons through another telescope. Better algorithms can sometimes recover information already present in astronomical archives.

ADAM has since expanded beyond asteroid discovery. The Trajectory Optimizer allows users to explore transfers between solar-system bodies and calculate propulsion requirements. The system produces launch-window information and trajectory visualizations based on standard astrodynamics methods.

Its public Impact Probability tools address another component of planetary defense: determining whether the range of possible future trajectories for an asteroid includes Earth. Such calculations change as new observations reduce uncertainty.

Asteroid 2024 YR4 supplied a real example of that process. After the asteroid was discovered in December 2024, early orbit calculations produced a small but meaningful probability of an Earth impact in 2032. Additional observations reduced the uncertainty, and NASA concluded in February 2025 that the asteroid posed no significant Earth-impact threat.

A residual possibility that 2024 YR4 might strike the Moon remained for a time. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed the asteroid again on February 18 and 26, 2026. Those measurements allowed the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies to rule out the 2032 lunar impact as well. The asteroid is expected to miss the lunar surface by about 21,200 km on December 22, 2032.

The episode demonstrates why changing impact probabilities should not be interpreted as an asteroid changing course. The object’s physical trajectory can remain essentially unchanged as improved observations reduce uncertainty about that trajectory.

Open-source development forms another part of the Asteroid Institute’s strategy. Its software resources include ADAM Core, Precovery, THOR, and related packages. Researchers can inspect methods, run components independently, test them on other datasets, and build additional tools around them.

Computation cannot replace observations that were never taken. Poor observational coverage can still leave substantial orbital uncertainty, and objects hidden by observing geometry still require suitable telescopes to detect them. B612’s software therefore complements astronomical surveys rather than making those surveys unnecessary.

What B612 Has Accomplished Since the Sentinel Era

Sentinel’s cancellation could have ended B612’s technical ambitions. Instead, the organization redirected them toward software, data processing, and collaboration.

Creating the Asteroid Institute in 2017 provided a formal structure for that change. Its work developed through relationships involving the University of Washington’s DiRAC Institute, Google Cloud, astronomers, and software developers.

The 27,500 discovery candidates announced in 2024 became the clearest demonstration of the new model. B612 did not build the telescope that created the underlying observations. Its contribution came from algorithms, orbital analysis, computing architecture, and the ability to search a dataset at large scale.

This pattern fits a broader role for nongovernmental organizations in space activity. New Space Economy’s examination of space NGOs describes how nonprofit organizations can contribute through research, software, policy, education, technical coordination, and specialized expertise without owning large spacecraft fleets.

Opening ADAM to outside users in October 2025 marked another stage. A research framework becomes more useful to the scientific community when researchers can access services directly rather than reproduce the underlying computing infrastructure themselves.

The institute continued expanding that capability in 2026. ADAM::Ephemeris added large-scale predicted-position calculations in May. B612 also continued publishing engineering work and supporting research connected with asteroid processing and Rubin Observatory data.

The foundation’s current public material shows an active organization rather than one preserving the memory of an abandoned spacecraft project. Its website contains 2026 program announcements, current personnel, active ADAM services, technical resources, donation programs, and educational initiatives.

The organization’s record still requires a distinction between aspiration and completed outcome. Sentinel was a high-profile private spacecraft project that did not fly. The Asteroid Institute’s accomplishments come from a different model based on computational infrastructure, open-source tools, research collaboration, and public engagement.

That change is central to understanding B612’s current status. Describing it solely as the organization that proposed Sentinel presents an outdated picture. The organization’s present technical identity is the Asteroid Institute and ADAM.

Where B612 Fits in Planetary Defense Today

Planetary defense in 2026 involves a network of government agencies, observatories, universities, research organizations, international institutions, and specialized nonprofit groups.

NASA’s planetary-defense program supports the discovery and characterization of near-Earth objects and coordinates United States government activity in this area. NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies operates Sentry, an automated collision-monitoring system that continuously examines the asteroid catalog for possible Earth impacts over the next 100 years.

NASA states that no known asteroid larger than 140 meters has a significant probability of hitting Earth during the next 100 years. That statement does not mean that every potentially hazardous asteroid has been discovered. Survey programs continue looking for the remaining population.

The Minor Planet Center provides another part of the international infrastructure. It acts as the central clearinghouse for observations and orbital data involving asteroids and comets, allowing measurements from observatories in many countries to be combined.

Mitigation technology has also advanced since B612 proposed Sentinel. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft intentionally struck Dimorphos, the moonlet of asteroid Didymos, on September 26, 2022. Measurements showed that the collision shortened Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos by about 32 minutes.

DART supplied the first direct demonstration that a spacecraft impact can measurably change the motion of an asteroid. Planetary-defense technologies consequently include a flight-tested kinetic-impact technique alongside continued development of detection, characterization, orbit-prediction, and response capabilities.

Discovery capability changed again on June 30, 2026, when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory formally began its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Rubin repeatedly images large portions of the southern sky, producing a stream of observations of changing and moving objects that includes asteroids.

New Space Economy’s Rubin overview explains the observatory’s significance for time-domain astronomy and solar-system discovery. The increasing number of detections also creates a data-processing problem. Observations must be connected to objects, converted into orbits, compared with earlier measurements, and processed fast enough to identify unusual or potentially hazardous cases.

A further expansion is expected from NASA’s NEO Surveyor, an infrared space telescope specifically designed to find and characterize near-Earth asteroids and comets. As of August 2026, NASA describes the mission as targeting launch in late 2027. Spacecraft hardware is being integrated and tested.

Infrared observing gives NEO Surveyor capabilities that complement visible-light ground surveys. An asteroid’s infrared emission provides useful information even when its surface is unusually dark in visible light, and the spacecraft’s location near the Sun-Earth L1 region will help it search observing geometries that are difficult from the ground.

B612 therefore sits between large observing programs and the users of asteroid information. It does not operate Rubin, control NASA’s planetary-defense program, replace the Minor Planet Center, or command an international warning system. Its contribution lies in computational methods that can help researchers make greater use of the observations those systems generate.

That position may become more useful as data volumes increase. Rubin will repeatedly produce moving-object measurements during its decade-long survey. NEO Surveyor will eventually add specialized infrared observations. Software capable of connecting detections, searching archives, modeling orbits, computing ephemerides, and evaluating trajectories can help turn those observational streams into usable knowledge.

How Education, Asteroid Day, and the Schweickart Prize Support Its Mission

B612 has maintained a public-education component throughout much of its history because planetary defense depends on sustained institutional attention during long periods without a known imminent impact threat.

The foundation helped establish Asteroid Day in 2014. The United Nations recognizes June 30 as International Asteroid Day, commemorating the Tunguska event of June 30, 1908, when a cosmic object exploded over Siberia and devastated a large forested area.

The date acquired additional significance in 2026 because Rubin Observatory began its Legacy Survey of Space and Time on June 30. B612 marked the coincidence through its Asteroid Day 2026 activities, connecting a long-running campaign for improved asteroid discovery with the start of one of astronomy’s largest survey programs.

Another continuing activity is the Schweickart Prize, named for B612 co-founder and Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart. The program recognizes student proposals that address planetary-defense problems and is intended to encourage new researchers and unconventional research directions.

B612 announced the 2026 recipients in June. Brian P. Murphy and Richard E. Cannon of the University of Edinburgh received the prize for Untold Threats: A Worldwide Call to Defend New Frontiers.

Their proposal expands planetary-defense thinking beyond impacts on Earth’s surface. It examines possible hazards to satellites, lunar infrastructure, communications systems, and other assets in cislunar space. The proposal calls for consideration of an International Commission on Space Infrastructure Resilience and a longer-term coordinating concept called WARDEN.

Those organizations do not presently exist as adopted international institutions. They are elements of the prize-winning proposal rather than established United Nations programs. Maintaining that distinction prevents a research proposal from being mistaken for approved international policy.

The winners received a $10,000 award, with the physical prize presented during Asteroid Day activities at Lowell Observatory in Arizona on June 27, 2026.

B612’s educational programs and its Asteroid Institute address different parts of the same subject. ADAM concentrates on technical analysis and computational infrastructure. Asteroid Day supports public awareness. The Schweickart Prize encourages researchers to examine planetary-defense problems that may become more significant as human activity expands beyond Earth.

The foundation reported in its 2026 prize announcement that individual donors from 46 countries support its work alongside larger donors. The Asteroid Institute describes its work as being financed through private individual donors to B612 rather than through operation as a government agency.

These programs provide additional evidence of organizational continuity. B612 remains active through technical development, philanthropy, education, research collaboration, and community programs rather than through the large spacecraft-development effort that once defined its public profile.

What B612’s Status Means for the Space Economy

B612 provides an example of participation in the space economy without manufacturing launch vehicles, operating a satellite constellation, or owning a major observatory. Its present work sits in software, astronomical data, cloud computing, orbital analysis, research collaboration, mission-planning tools, and technical education.

The distinction between collecting data and extracting information from data becomes more significant as observatories produce larger datasets. Rubin demonstrates the issue directly. Building and operating the observatory requires physical infrastructure, optics, detectors, computing systems, public funding, and long-term operations. Scientific value also depends on software capable of processing, linking, classifying, distributing, and analyzing the resulting observations.

B612’s 2024 asteroid work demonstrated one consequence of that model. Google Cloud supplied scalable computing infrastructure. B612 and its research collaborators supplied asteroid-specific algorithms and orbital expertise. Historical survey archives supplied observational data. The resulting workflow combined astronomy, cloud computing, software engineering, and orbital mechanics without requiring another dedicated spacecraft.

Similar arrangements appear elsewhere in space activity. Satellite imagery businesses depend increasingly on analytics and data-processing platforms. Communications operators require complex network-management software. Spacecraft operators use terrestrial cloud systems for data processing, simulation, and distribution.

B612 applies a comparable information-centered model to small-body astronomy, although it remains a nonprofit organization pursuing scientific and planetary-defense objectives rather than a commercial asteroid operator.

The organization’s trajectory tools may also have relevance to future scientific or commercial small-body missions. ADAM can calculate transfers between celestial objects, and its ephemeris service predicts where target bodies should be located. Those are standard requirements for mission analysis regardless of whether a mission is government, academic, nonprofit, or commercial.

That does not turn B612 into an asteroid-mining organization. Resource extraction from asteroids faces separate questions involving spacecraft economics, target characterization, extraction technology, regulation, financing, transportation, and customer demand. B612’s connection is narrower: better orbital information and accessible trajectory analysis can reduce some of the informational barriers involved in reaching small bodies.

Asteroid mission experience demonstrates that these objects differ greatly in composition, internal structure, surface properties, rotation, and orbital behavior. Precise position and trajectory information is an important mission-planning layer, but direct reconnaissance and physical characterization remain necessary.

B612 also demonstrates both the possibilities and limits of philanthropic space programs. Sentinel showed how difficult it can be for a nonprofit to finance a sophisticated deep-space observatory independently. The Asteroid Institute model lowers the requirement for capital-intensive spacecraft ownership by building on observations collected by publicly funded and institutional observatories.

Software development and cloud computation still require money and skilled personnel, but a relatively small organization can potentially influence much larger scientific datasets if its algorithms improve the productivity of existing observations.

The THOR analysis provides a concrete example. B612 did not take the original astronomical images. Its computational methods identified relationships in those observations that previous processing had not recovered, creating tens of thousands of candidate asteroid discoveries from already existing data.

Planetary defense also produces benefits that do not fit neatly into an ordinary commercial revenue model. Better asteroid catalogs benefit governments, scientific institutions, spacecraft operators, insurers, exploration programs, and the general public. Preventing a rare but potentially destructive impact creates a public benefit whose economic value cannot easily be captured by one commercial provider.

Government agencies and nonprofit institutions therefore remain natural participants even as commercial space activity expands.

B612’s place in the 2026 space economy can best be understood as specialized knowledge infrastructure. Its output consists mainly of software, computational services, research methods, datasets, technical collaboration, and trained expertise. That activity is less visually dramatic than launching the proposed Sentinel telescope, but it matches the growing economic and scientific importance of turning large volumes of astronomical data into usable information.

Summary

The B612 Foundation remains active as of August 2026. It is a United States-based nonprofit focused on developing tools and technologies to understand, map, and navigate the solar system and to improve humanity’s ability to protect Earth from asteroid impacts.

Its current identity differs substantially from the organization that attracted widespread attention with the Sentinel Space Telescope proposal in 2012. Sentinel was never launched and became a canceled mission. B612 responded by shifting its technical emphasis toward computational astronomy.

The Asteroid Institute now forms the center of that strategy. Its ADAM platform supports precovery searches, impact-probability analysis, spacecraft trajectory planning, asteroid discovery, and ephemeris calculations. THOR demonstrated that computational methods could recover tens of thousands of asteroid candidates from historical observations, and ADAM became publicly accessible in 2025.

B612 continued developing the platform during 2026 with the release of ADAM::Ephemeris. Its Asteroid Institute remains staffed and active, and the foundation continues its Schweickart Prize, Asteroid Day participation, educational activity, and privately supported research program.

The external planetary-defense environment has also changed substantially. NASA demonstrated kinetic asteroid deflection with DART. Rubin Observatory formally began its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time on June 30, 2026. NASA continues developing NEO Surveyor for a targeted late-2027 launch.

Those programs reduce the need for B612 to build its own large detection telescope, but they do not eliminate the need for specialized data analysis. Larger surveys create larger data streams. More observations generate greater demand for software that can connect detections, calculate orbits, recover archival observations, predict positions, assess impact probabilities, and plan spacecraft trajectories.

B612 therefore should neither be described as an organization still attempting to launch Sentinel nor as an organization that disappeared after Sentinel failed to fly. Its operating model changed.

The organization now functions as a specialized nonprofit contributor within a much larger planetary-defense system. It concentrates on areas where computation, open-source software, data science, astrodynamics, research collaboration, education, and philanthropy can complement the much larger observing and mission programs operated by governments and research institutions.

The change from Sentinel to ADAM may prove to be the most informative part of B612’s history. Its original strategy assumed that closing the asteroid-discovery gap required another telescope. Its present strategy recognizes that discovering and understanding more small bodies also depends on extracting more information from the observations humanity already possesses and from the much larger datasets now beginning to arrive.