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NASA Planning Mission To 40-Meter-Wide Asteroid
FudRucker points out a story from The Guardian about NASA's plans to visit 2000SG344, an asteroid 40 meters wide and weighing roughly 71 million kilograms. The manned mission would take three to six months, and it would make use of the Orion spacecraft, which will be replacing to retiring space shuttle fleet.
"A report seen by the Guardian notes that by sending astronauts on a three-month journey to the hurtling asteroid, scientists believe they would learn more about the psychological effects of long-term missions and the risks of working in deep space, and it would allow astronauts to test kits to convert subsurface ice into drinking water, breathable oxygen and even hydrogen to top up rocket fuel. All of which would be invaluable before embarking on a two-year expedition to Mars. As well as giving space officials a taste of more complex missions, samples taken from the rock could help scientists understand more about the birth of the solar system and how best to defend against asteroids that veer into Earth's path."
NASA plans a large number of missions but political considerations affect their budget so much that I wouldn't bet this is going to happen, no matter how cool it sounds. Right now, Mars is officially high on the agenda, so stepping-stones toward Mars are hot. In 5 years the next administration might decide to take the unmanned direction and this will go to the back burner. For the moment this should be thought of as contingency planning.
It would be awesome, don't get me wrong.. I actually think this is The Way To Go [TM] and I'm surprised to even see this being studied but NASA is not planning to send a manned mission to an asteroid, not now, not in 20 years time.. maybe *after* Mars is done but as I doubt NASA will have anything to do with that, I'm thinking they won't have anything to do with going to an asteroid either.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What if they can't convince Bruce Willis to come along?
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
They should have them bring a can of white and Black Paint to measure its affect.
And hopes that this happens. Personally, this is 'Cool shit' (tm) and I hope that this does eventualy.
Perhaps they could shave off some of that 3 Million slated for NASA MMO and slosh it towards this. Lets face it, a 3 Million dollar game would look like a uni science project, but it might get put to some sort of use here at least.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Okay, so it's really really big. But not "too" big. And it just happens to be in an orbit that's very close to earth's orbit around the sun. So I'm guessing that with the right nudges at the right times, it'd be possible to swing that rock around the moon and park it in orbit around the earth. And having a million tons of raw material in orbit is something that both makes more sense than a manned landing, and is a lot more interesting and exciting, to me at least.
So that's why they were wondering about the effects of staying in bed for 90 days!
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Hopefully through their all research, hard work, and bravery they'll finally discover
what it's like to go out one side of the screen and come back in the other.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
However, when writing an article, is it too hard to call it 71,000 tons (or tonnes, or "metric" tons - they're all essentially the same unit - with a percent or two)
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Unmanned missions may be cheaper and safer, but sending out real people to expand the horizons of human activity in space is much more important. It gets people excited! That brings in money and inspires young people.
Then, when NASA has a huge group of talented experts and tons of cash, they can do real science instead of worrying every day about whether the budget will get slashed before they can complete the current round of experiments.
When the reporters start getting stuff right I start getting worried.
Any time I read anything in the press that I personally know about, I dispair at just how far wrong the reporters are.
It's the little things, like an order of magnitude here or there. We say 10,000 they say 100,000 what's a 0 between friends.
So I assume that anything I read is little more than an vague approximation of the truth.
I'm not even getting all tin hat.
Think Hanlon's Razor..
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
40 metres doesn't sound like a very big asteroid. What happens if they miss?
Would somebody *please* think of the children???
I mean if NASA goes on spending recklessly on such projects, who is going to feed the poor kids in Iraq, and not to mention upcoming Iran, Syria and N.Korea (although in this case it would be radioactive S.Korean kids).
NASA is just literally throwing money away to send 2 girls and 1 man away for tax-payer-funded jaunts to the ultimate holiday-spot: Asteriod!
I say we snatch NASA's budgets and feed it to Cheney; er sorry, Halliburton so that they could prosecute this devastating War to its conclusion.
Of all the daring, reckless things NASA can do, this rates the 3rd worst: The first was the Hubble-Schubble telescope thingy that NASA claims can take photos 130 million light-years away, but can't take photos of my Pet Cat! I mean who wants to look into the past 130 million years ago? Didn't God say he created Earth 6,000 years ago?
Secondly they sent TWO stupid rovers to Mars and cheer loudly when their rovers cross 6 mph speed. I mean, come on. My Hummer easily tops at 112 mph on a Texas village road! Who the hell needs photos from Mars, when the money can be spent to 'assist' JP Morgan and Citibank so that the poor executives can support their children at harvard? Plus Mars has no oil or CNG. Atleast Venus and Europa have oil.
Thirdly now this stupid honeymoon jaunt for 3 months!!!
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Some Physical information about the asteroid and Orbital Information. The first link mentions the diameter to be 30-70m, hopefully they are gonna land on the 70m of the asteroid yea?
The United States is an utterly bankrupt nation - we don't even have the cash to repair our crumbling infrastructure. Toss this in the bin with returning to the Moon, going to Mars, space elevators, Freedom Towers, maglevs between LA and Vegas, and all the other interesting but utterly financially pointless and impossible projects.
This is a coverup of the fact that 2000SG344 will hit Earth as was originally reported in year 2000. What is a more perfect cover than to actually plan out the whole mission under the guise of advancing science or preparing for Mars? Then, once independent scientists wise up, public can be reassured that NASA developed the technology to deflect the asteroid with a series of controlled, directed pocket nuke type charges.
Just a technical note. With an asteroid this tiny, you don't land on it, you dock with it. The gravity will be practically non-existent.
Probably best to go nose first, nose down. Then you'll be able to see it so you don't hit it so hard.
> about NASA's plans for a manned visit to 2000SG344 an asteroid 40 meters wide and weighing roughly 71 million kilograms
40 meters wide is OK, but saying something weights 71 million kilograms sounds stupid. In countries where the metric system is in use, nobody would say, rather simply use "71 thousand tons". One metric ton is 1000 kilograms.
(Coincidentally 71000 metric tons is about the weight of the largest ever japanese space battleship Yamato.)
The news source is possibly doing this weird "million kilogram" wording, because an american ton is only 908 kilograms, making people confused.
Does anyone who knows anything about solar physics know whether or not you could use a small body like this as a solar flare shelter? If you are in deep space or in a hard-to-change orbit around a large body (like the moon), if a solar flare happens you're out of luck. If you're on the surface of a body with little or no atmosphere I guess you're still out of luck. But with a small body like this could you just zip to the side in the shadow? Could this make long-term trips like this safer than say going to the moon?
The idea is reminiscent of an Arthur C. Clarke story about a trip to Icarus.
On a more sinister note, while the delta-V for CAPTURE of this body around earth might be prohibitive using todays technology, what about for IMPACT? Not the U.S. would want to do such an obvious war provoking act but wondering if it could be done with just chemical propellants. Of course it depends on how far in advance you have to alter the course, orbital parameters etc.
Now if we were really good at orbital mechanics we could possibly have it skim the atmosphere to lose some delta-v for capture. Don't think anyone's gonna try that though.
I am genuinely descended from the ecosystem, therefore I'm congenitally predisposed to live in a natural state. I could reach such an altitude that I would wish to be immortal!
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Maybe you folks on slashdot have a 30 second attention span, or maybe most of you just haven't been paying attention. Maybe you were born yesterday.. if that's the case, then the comments make sense.
Nasa and the UK/AU have been building ships to destroy an asteroid since 1998. Anyone recall this at all? Did you not see this on the BBC/Space.com/anything at all. Is every day a new one for you?
Why would this be do you think? Why would Nasa keep sending up ships to destroy near Earth asteroids. It's not like they have alot of money to begin with. Hmmm, is it to extract metals from nearby rocks at $100,000 per hour? No.. let's see. Do they want to starve the children in asscrackistan or baliachiland? No? Well then, let's think real freakin hard.
An asteroid is going to hit this planet you morons. They have known this for 10 years. Right before the time those 2 comedic asteroid movies mysteriously started filming redundantly.
Nasa and the government are concerned with survival. That is it. The research BS is to keep you entertained and all you foreigners waiting around like gerbils in a jar. Don't start believing in fairy tales now. Listen to the astronauts that actually worked there.
But this is just one piece of what's coming ladies. Don't worry about somebody 3000 miles away. Worry about yourself.
... what will be the affect of the next election on NASA and NASA's budget. According to this chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:NASA_budget_linegraph_BH.PNG), it looks like Democrats tend to roll back NASA's budget whereas Republicans tend to increase it, ignoring of course the Apollo years (arguably that money was looked at as Cold War defense expenditures, not space program expenses). To summarize the chart, during the Carter years, NASA's inflation-adjusted budget went down. During the Reagan years it went up a little. During Bush I it went up dramatically, and then it went down quite a bit during the Clinton (I?) years. During Bush II it also went up a little. Now what will happen should a) Obama b) Clinton II c) McCain become the next president? My guess would be a) down a lot, b) down a little, c) up a little.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
no radioactivity, only damage. Put a few small one in huge orbits around the earth....
I hope people are prepared for the day when we first lose someone outside of the play pen that the shuttle has been in. I hope everything goes well but what happens if something goes wrong and someone floats off in to forever so to speak? How are people going to handle that? What do they do to prepare the people going on the mission in case that happens? Do they offer them a quick and painless option so to speak? I'm kinda curious.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
kits to convert subsurface ice into ...hydrogen
WTF??? We can't even do this on Earth with net positive energy! How are we going to carry enough energy out to a friggin' ASTEROID to crack enough hydrogen for fuel?
NASA makes plans to invade a-rock
Description
Your space craft is dangerously situated among fast moving asteroids in an asteroid belt that can destroy your ship on contact. Armed with a front mounted weapon and the ability to hyperspace, you fly through the debris, destroying each rock one piece at a time. Alien saucers visit the playfield from time to time with an eye towards destroying your ship
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Acccording to the article, if this 40 Meter, 71,000 Ton asteroid hit earth it would release the energy of 1.1 million tons of TNT.
Lets change the units...
1.1 Million Tons of TNT == 1.1 Megatons
The governments capable of getting to this thing have weapons WELL in excess of that strength on hand. They don't even have to spend hundreds of Millions of Dollars to get to the asteroid, move it (also probably with a nuke) and target it.
The escape velocity on this asteroid is 1.5 cm/s. Yes, centimeters. One small step for man, one giant trajectory for that same man.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
If this asteroid hits the earth it will release about 1.1 million tons of TNT worth of energy.
Put it another way, it is equivalent to a 1.1 Megaton Nuke (with little or no radioactivity)
I believe minimum safe distance for a megaton nuke (WITH radiation) is 20 kilometers...so 20 miles is perfect
... And what they'll find is a vain rose, three vulcanos (one dead but you never know) and a little boy asking them to draw a shield for the rose that he loves so much..
Defining Statistics and Social Research
A stepping stone to Mars? Perhaps, but this should signal more than that. Given that we have a better chance to be productive by sending missions, manned or otherwise, to Venus (aerostatic drones or ships in the upper atmosphere) or Titan or Enceladus, is there any hope that for missions like that instead? It seems that a mission to Mars is simply misguided. Yes, it would be a great achievement. Perhaps I am biased here, but after reading about the subject more, it seems fairly obvious that better long term gains could be made through other types of space missions beside a Mars mission. Mars is in the spotlight, but how hard would it be to shift America's short attention span and inform them that Venus is now the most promising frontier? I hope this madness (?) over a Mars mission will segue into more useful missions on the clock of what I hope is a more intelligently visionary administration. Call me biased, though.
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WWWWD - What would Wil Wheaton do?
I drank what? -- Socrates
Why not actually use the SI prefixes and units?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
No, I don't mean by causing a nuclear winter through an impact. Instead how about putting it into a "halo" orbit where it circles (in a halo) between earth and sun. (As a previous poster indicated, it'll take something like like 1.37km/s delta-v, you'll need a mass driver/ion engine or something like that. Then, with a solar powered grinder, take the asteroid which may already be largely rubble and make it into a powder, spewing it slowly into space (with a 1.5cm/s escape velocity it'll be hard not to).
The (very fine) dust from 71K tons of asteroid might be able to cast quite a shadow. Of course, the solar wind will eventually blow it away (which is probably a good thing, we don't want a permanent solution). But it might buy us some time at the relatively cheap cost of single (big) space mission.
(this idea is a cheap variant of something I heard a space scientist propose, launching trillions of small actively controlled refracting lenses/films to block out the sun. His idea was expensive but permanent. Mine is cheap but temporary).
Bonus: Put a special nozzle on the dust ejector and you might be able to form patterns. Companies might pay to see their logo's silhouetted against the sun that everyone on earth could say every day. (How about Ray-Ban?).
(this comes from another Arthur C. Clarke story where someone causes the ionosphere to light up by shooting up a cloud of particles from the moon. Unbeknownst to the scientists performing the experiment a company had put a special nozzle on the ejector).
I don't know about anyone else but anytime I hear compound SI units or units with both scientific notation and metric prefixes bug me. It's 71 billion grams, 7.1 x10^10 grams, or better yet, 71 Gigagrams.
... a couple of nukes and a boring machine they just *happened* to have lying around.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
From what I can see, all NASA seems to really want is nine to five and a sky-high paycheck. We could easily have a real space station, be building moonbase and exploring the solar system, if we really wanted too, in my opinion. No, apparently from my vantage point, what people really want to do is to stay home, watch cops and robbers, sports and soldiers on high definition television while drinking alcohol and screwing around.
Go ahead, tell me it ain't so!
NASA is attaching a rocket engine and control booth and A astronaut will steer it back to earth where it will be safely allowed to strike the earth in Area 51, Halliburton won a no bid contract and is in charge of extracting 71 million pounds of gold for the Bush family...oh...err...I mean the federal government.
you leave wesley crusher out of this.... you know he hasn't been right since he went traveling with that queer across the universe
WWPD - What Would Picard Do?
This would be quite interesting if NASA chose to send a bunch of guys from an oil drilling rig up to the asteroid to blow it up. It would be just like Armageddon. But, hopefully with a better plot...
"weighing roughly 71 million kilograms."
No, no it does not have that weight in it's current position. It may have that mass, however...
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.