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."

Comments

Huh?

[zappepcs]

COTS - commercial off the shelf - parts is standard industry stuff. I'm wondering how this cut enough costs to be winner. What are the other people using? There is a lot of military hardware built with COTS. Does anyone have enough info on the other competitors to say why COTS undercut them?

Another Asteriod Mission

[Esteanil]

I really do wonder if it's within the scope of today's technology to take one of these asteroids and guide it into earth orbit. For instance using small nuclear devices to prod it carefully to where it should be.

Because an easy source of raw materials in orbit would certainly make a lot of things a *lot* more interesting, considering the price of lifting such materials to orbit.

Can we capture it?

[dl107227]

It would be nice if we could nudge it into an orbit around Earth. That way we would have a handy counterweight available for a space elevator.