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Asteroid Mission Competition Announces Winner
Riding with Robots writes "The Planetary Society invited participants to compete for $50,000 in prizes by designing a mission to rendezvous with and 'tag' a potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroid. The asteroid Apophis was used as the target for the mission design because it will come closer to Earth in 2029 than the orbit of geostationary satellites. The winning mission design is called Foresight, and calls for the use of off-the-shelf parts to undercut the price of other proposals. Here's a PDF of the winning proposal."
Apophis... Didn't he try to destroy earth with an asteroid in SG1?
This is a very small spend (in terms of space missions), quite within the capability of Europe and Japan, let alone, China, Russia and the USA. By the anticipated launch date India may even have the capability. Since this very small spend, and will give us an early warning as to whether a very large project to deflect the asteroid is needed, I am surprised that an "interest group" like the planetary society are the people looking into it. Maybe their costings will give some impetus to some country to achieve it.
Yep. In essence, the main drawback to COTS parts is the need to verify whether they'll still function within the parameters of the environment to which they're being sent. Highly temperature-sensitive circuits, for instance, would not be a good COTS part to use in a spacecraft.
I believe this to be prohibitive, not because of guiding and asteroid would be impossible, but because for a earth orbit you'd have to slow it down a lot.
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
I think the asteroid is rather small to be causing big tidal effects. It's only 200-300m or so, if I'm remembering right.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
"Tides would certainly change"
Just how large a body do think the author was writing about?