ARKYD: A Space Telescope for Everyone

[rhoenix]

Since the formation of Planetary Resources, our primary goal has been to build technology enabling us to prospect and mine asteroids. We've spent the last year making great leaps in the development of these technologies. These advancements have presented us with the opportunity to engage in another passion of our team:
to make space exploration accessible to everyone.

Space has always been something that most people only dream about. Very few ever get the chance to experience space — to feel that overwhelming sense of awe described by astronauts. Our challenge and vision is this: how can we make
that a reality?

Introducing: The ARKYD — [ahrk-kid]

The ARKYD is a technologically advanced, orbiting space telescope that will be controlled by YOU, the crowd, through your pledges and community involvement! You can even direct your telescope time to non-profit science centers and universities for use in your communities!

Just think about the true impact of this endeavor for a moment. Together we can provide access to technology that costs tens of millions of dollars into the hands of students, scientists and a new generation of explorers, who will use it in ways we can’t even fathom yet!

At Planetary Resources, our primary focus is mining asteroids, and we’re pushing the boundaries of what is possible by vertically integrating and applying innovations from consumer-based industries. It’s our goal to reduce the cost of space observatories many times over, allowing anyone to access them for their own use. We want to empower the crowd to solve the big problems of our time — and this is the first step to making that a reality.

Goals We Want to Achieve:
Our primary mission is to develop low-cost robotic spacecraft to explore and mine resource-rich asteroids within our reach. The first step to making this possible is the launching a fleet of ARKYD spacecraft to identify asteroids that are ripe for further exploration. This same capability has numerous other potential applications in education and research. The goals that we want to achieve with this Kickstarter mission are four-fold:

To give students access to space capabilities — Whether studying planets in a 5th grade class or writing a graduate thesis, students of all ages will have the ability to direct the telescope and explore what interests them! We’re planning some exciting new educational opportunities just for K-12 educational programs.

To support important research and discovery — There are thousands of institutions and researchers in need for greater access to in-orbit space observatories. The ARKYD will provide a new, low-cost resource to help observe distant galaxies, search for alien planets, and monitor the skies for potentially dangerous asteroids. Researchers at MIT, the University of Washington, and across the globe have shown interest in using the ARKYD to further their important research.

To build excitement about space and all of its potential — The ARKYD is designed to be a fun and interactive experience that is accessible to anyone. This kind of direct access to a satellite is unprecedented. Our backers will be the first people in history to control a public space telescope!

To give YOU a say — What makes this mission unique is that we’re putting control of the telescope in YOUR hands. You’ll get the opportunity to help decide which science centers and museums are the beneficiaries of ARKYD telescope time, what photos to take, and more. We’re putting YOU in control! By pledging toward this mission, you’ll receive access to our website and mobile apps allowing you to follow along with the progress of the satellite, sneak peaks at photos and videos, and get voting access to make your voice heard in the future direction of the satellite!

Fine - I can admit I have a not-so-small personal bias with being interested here in a new space telescope. To me though, this is a very impressive implementation of crowdfunding - the pursuit of knowledge.

[Charon]

Fuck, you beat me to it.

I already threw money at this.

[rhoenix]

An update for this project:

"Most of you know about Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company, and their Kickstarter campaign in the finest spirit of Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon. The campaign has reached its minimum $1M goal to get funded with eight days left to go. In celebration, PR's CEO and Chief Asteroid Miner Chris Lewicki does an interview with Forbes where he discusses the future opportunities, the potential pitfalls, and the unlimited potential of private sector space exploitation. It's well worth the read. Planetary Resources' kickstarter has some worthy stretch goals that are well worth looking at, and the sort of supporter premiums that many Slashdotters will not want to miss. Only $175,000 more and they get a second ground station, at $2M they add exoplanet search capability. Both of these stretch goals are within reach."

Good stuff to see. The article in question:

Planetary Resources’ Kickstarter project was a rousing success. I wrote about their ARKYD Kickstarter launch event with Brent Spiner here. With nine days to go, the ARKYD Kickstarter has raised over $1 million, and is on its way towards its stretch goal of $2 million. The company recently announced some stretch goals for the final $2 million level of funding. It amounts to a hardware upgrade that adds “exoplanet transit detection capability by enhancing the telescope’s stability systems and dedicating time to monitor candidate star systems,” according to a recent blog entry on the company’s Kickstarter site. The upgrade also allows for “better measurement of the spin-properties of asteroids,” using this same exploratory capability.

“Exoplanets“ are planets that are located outside our solar system. The reason why there is such interest in them is because scientists are seeking a habitable planet, a “Biosphere 2″ that is similar to that of Earth. These targets of the ARKYD’s expanded exploratory capability are known as “transiting exoplanets,” and the pioneering research on exoplanet atmospheres, exoplanet interior composition and exoplanet biosignatures is being done by MIT’s Sara Seager.

It is the actual transit of the planet that sets off the eurekas in space scientists. A transiting exoplanet involves the planet’s crossing in front of its star. It is considered a bona fide “transit” when the brightness of a parent star dims for a short period of time, as the transiting planet passes in orbit in front of it. So far, researchers have confirmed 450 exoplanets that orbit nearby stars. It leaves one wondering, of course — how many exoplanet systems have Earth-like planets in them?

I caught up with Chris Lewicki, the company’s CEO in Seattle, with some specific questions about how Planetary Resources’ new model of hybrid crowdsourcing and crowfunding of the ARKYD project was going, and where it is headed from here.

Michael Venables: How does “making space accessible to everyone” and enabling “citizen scientists” translate to science awareness in general and STEM education programs in particular in the U.S.?

Chris Lewicki: With regards to exploration of space for the past 50 years, it has been supported by tax dollars and performed by the government. And then something that people watch other people do. And it’s of course, very exciting that some of the things we have done have opened up new frontiers. Whether it’s the Mars missions or the rings of Saturn or the outer reaches of the solar system. But by making it accessible, by allowing any member of the public to do that mission themselves really connects them more personally with it. Now instead of something they watched on TV, it’s something they personally experienced. And, that’s really powerful for understanding what makes science and technology work. Especially for people who are still choosing their path in life, it gives them a window into a career that they might want to consider pursuing — in science, technology, engineering and math.

Venables: According to NASA figures, there are more than 21,000 pieces of orbital debris larger than 10 cm. currently in Earth orbit. Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels degrade our oceans, agriculture, forestry, ecosystems and human health. How can we create a sustainable model of a space economy in extracting and processing near-Earth natural resources when we’ve largely failed to do on our own planet?

Lewicki: The resources in space that are the most interesting in the near term are the resources that actually help us explore space. These are the water, fuel and elements to support life that are available on near-Earth asteroids. By getting that material from space to use it in space, it’s much like a settler, as they were settling the Americas, of [their] living off the land and not having to bring all their rations with them. So it requires us to launch less stuff into space to create fewer rockets. And to really be able to leverage all those wonderful resources out there in space. With regards to the next step in exploration and development of mining materials in space, we go to great lengths on this planet to get some of the rarest materials, like the platinum metals from the Earth’s crust. And in some cases, that has increasing environmental impact as the materials become more scarce and we have to go deeper into the Earth and create bigger mines. In that case, going to a more plentiful source, in some cases, some of the near-Earth asteroids, allows us to reduce the environmental burden on Earth, and preserve the Earth as more of a special place. Especially since the Earth is literally a tiny crumb in the entire universe in terms of the resources that are accessible to us.

Venables: Prospecting and extracting resources in deep space mining with the ARKYD spacecraft rests on the assumption of investment in the prospective NASA L2 spacelab and other private investments in the new space mining economy. What is your plan to create and maintain government and private investment partnerships to create the necessary infrastructure for this new space economy?

Lewicki: Our business at Planetary Resources certainly would not be possible without the pioneering work of NASA, the U.S. government and other governments in the last 50 years of space exploration. All of the technology that’s been developed, the understanding that we have about our solar system and near-Earth asteroids was something that was a result of the government’s investment. Today we have the opportunity because of technology, because of the cost and private investment, to leverage that infrastructure towards creating a business, creating a new economy and creating new jobs. I see in the future that this, both private investment and government investment, actually continuing in the form of a private-public partnership. NASA has been very successful in finding new ways to do a routine thing — launch payload into low-Earth orbit. And they have partnered with two private businesses, SpaceX and Orbital, to be able to have private companies offer this capability as a service, so that NASA can focus on the more difficult and more challenging things that only the government can do. And I see that as being an excellent model for how we actually can get some of the routine and most basic things done in space science and potentially even use hub space resources towards NASA and other government missions in the future.

Venables: What is your vision for maintaining sustainable near-Earth laboratories and human colonies?

Lewicki: Our mission will be able to be conducted entirely with robotic activities and robotic spacecraft — robotic prospectors, robotic mining equipment that will all be teleoperated by human operators here on Earth. Certainly, what we will be doing in our business will enable and will help support the establishment and supply of what colonies or settlements or laboratories in space may need. We will be part of that overall supplier chain for all of the industries that are developing in space, as humans extend their reach beyond low-Earth orbit deeper into the solar system.

Venables: What is the next step for the ongoing ARKYD development project?

Lewicki: We are in the middle of creating our constellation of ARKYD space telescopes which we are planning to launch in 2015, regardless of the success of the Kickstarter. The Kickstarter was something to augment and to enhance what we are already planning on doing. So we are proceeding with that part of the program and getting our core asteroid prospecting technology available on Earth orbit. The Kickstarter campaign allows us to see if there is public interest and public engagement for really leveraging what the company is already doing, and fulfilling a lot of private interest in what we are doing in that regard. We actually are, at the moment, in the company, working on completing a demonstration of our core spacecraft technology, which we will be launching into space next spring. This is called the ARKYD 3. It is a cubesat, which has our core avionics and pointing and guidance communication technology. That will be something that will be in space next year. We are demoing that technology so that it can be ready for the ARKYD 100 missions that follow the next year in 2015.

Venables: What is your own personal, core motivation to drive the “democratization of space discovery”?

Lewicki: The short answer is that it’s just for me personally (and I think for many people) very inspirational of the sense of wonder — that anyone can go on a hike, go into the wilderness and be inspired by nature. But not everyone can go into space and be inspired by the beauty of space and think about the frontier and how that might represent future opportunities for humankind. So that transformation has only been happening only recently. And, as I have been involved in government activities when I worked with NASA, doing the exploration is very fun. It is certainly an experience that not many people have the opportunity [to experience], and it doesn’t come very many times in a lifetime, even for those who do [experience space exploration]. But now we have the opportunity to be able to share that experience, and the projects that we are doing have demonstrated that that’s been the case.

The other piece that I wanted to comment on is, in many ways what we are experiencing in space exploration kind of happened out of order. In the 1960s, the program we had to land a man on the moon was something that was ripped out of the future. Maybe that was something that would have naturally happened in the 1990s and 2000s, or 2010s. But there was a political reason to get that done, and get that done quickly. So that became the focus of what we did as a nation, and what we did as a species for space exploration. And that kind of locked up a lot of space exploration directly in government activities. It wasn’t the government that created the automobile or the airplane. Those were all private activities. But in space it was kind of inverse. We’re now kind of having a more natural growth and a second space race, where the interesting things and the frontiers and the economics are all being driven by private interests. And I think we can finally come to a time, both with what the government is doing and with what is privately possible, that allows this to proceed on a natural course than its original cause for coming into being.

Venables: Does the U.S. space program need to be overhauled?

Lewicki: I think it probably does. It has been a challenging thing. We have a federal agency that was created to solve a very urgent need 40 to 50 years ago, and created a lot of infrastructure that’s related to that goal and frankly has done a lot of great things since. But, it is kind of continually reevaluating itself and continually being pulled by the political process in what their goals should be and the level of funding [should be] to achieve those goals, and the techniques [with] which they do that. And I think that’s been a really challenging thing for NASA — to be able to try and do productive work in both fundamental research and development and other national priorities because of the way that they got started, which is very different from any other federal agency or any activity of our government.

The Kepler spacecraft has recently experienced a series of equipment failures of two of its four reaction wheels that control the pointing accuracy of the vehicle. Reaction wheel 4 failed on May 11, 2013. According to the Kepler Mission Manager Update, the analysis of recent telemetry received from Kepler and any planned recovery actions “will likely be on the order of weeks, possibly months,” according to a recent NASA update. It seems that the advent of the ARKYD space telescope project could not have come at a better time for space exploration. For the near future, it seems that continuing the search for habitable planets rests in the hands of a new breed — citizen-scientists like you.