asteroid-finding space telescope, to be called Sentinel, with a goal of raising $30 to $40 million per year. The space observatory's objective would be to accurately survey NEOs from an orbit similar to that Venus, creating a large dynamic catalog of such objects that would help identify dangerous Earth-impactors, deemed a necessary precursor to mounting any asteroid deflection mission. In March and April 2013, several weeks after the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion injured some 1,500 people, the U.S. Congress held hearings for "...the Risks, Impacts and Solutions for Space Threats". They received testimony from B612 head Ed Lu (see video at right), as well as Dr. Donald K. Yeomans, head of NASA's NEO Program Office, Dr. Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland and co-chair of a 2009 U.S. National Research Council study on asteroid threats, plus others. The difficulty of quickly intercepting an imminent asteroid threat to Earth was made apparent during the testimony: As a result of a set of hearings by the NASA Advisory Committee following the Chelyabinsk explosion in 2013, in conjunction with a White House request to double its budget, NASA's Near Earth Object Program funding was increased to $40.5 M/year in its FY2014 (Fiscal Year 2014) budget. It had previously been increased to $20.5 M/year in FY2012 (about 0.1% of NASA's annual budget at the time), from an average of about $4 M/year between 2002 and 2010. Asteroid hazard reassessment On Earth Day, April 22, 2014, the B612 Foundation formally presented a revised assessment on the frequency of "city-killer" type impact events, based on research led by Canadian planetary scientist Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario's (UWO) Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration. Dr. Brown's analysis, "A 500-Kiloton Airburst Over Chelyabinsk and An Enhanced Hazard from Small Impactors", published in the journals Science and Nature, was used to produce a short computer-animated video that was presented to the media at the Seattle Museum of Flight. The nearly one and a half minute video displayed a rotating globe with the impact points of about 25 asteroids measuring more than one, and up to 600 kilotons of blast force, that struck the Earth from 2000 to 2013 (for comparison, the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was equivalent to about 16 kilotons of TNT blast force). Of those impacts between 2000 and 2013, eight of them were as large, or larger, than the Hiroshima bomb. Only