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NASA Considers Putting an Asteroid Into Orbit Around the Moon
Zothecula writes "To paraphrase an old saying, if the astronaut can't go to the asteroid, then the asteroid must come to the astronaut. In a study released by the Keck Institute for Space Studies, researchers outlined a mission (PDF) to tow an asteroid into lunar orbit by 2025 using ion propulsion and a really big bag. The idea is to bring an asteroid close to Earth for easy study and visits by astronauts without the hazards and expense of a deep space mission. Now, Keck researchers say NASA officials are evaluating the plan to see whether it's something they want to do. The total cost is estimated to be roughly $2.6 billion."
Could just imagine it done wrong and it eventually just smacks into us.
I feel like I have read this article before. NASA Plans To "Lasso" Asteroid and Turn It Into Space Station
Sometimes, it doesn't matter how small the probability for disaster is. If the potential disaster is large enough, then it just shouldn't be done. I'm thinking that this is one of those things.
Asteroid Hits Earth, Scientists To Blame
One NASA official was quoted as saying, "Oops!"
In other news, global warming ceases to be a problem as nuclear winter spreads across the globe...
afterword please bombard Mars.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It would be spectacular if movies were made based upon potential Nasa missions and the awesome adventures that would entail. Perhaps that would get through to the masses. Unfortunately these thins are so mind-boggling to our uneducated masses that they don't see the amazing technical feat and engineering this requires, nor the art and wonder of it all. It's beyond their culture of lulz, shopping, and life stress. We love our movies though and they can still help us remember how to dream. I'd love to see a resurgence of sci-fi with an aim at inspiring us to push forward.
Dustin - A different story...
For those musing, here's a Asteroid Impact Effect Calculator. Should be quite a bang :-)
"using ion propulsion and a really big bag" It'll be worth every penny for the your momma jokes alone.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
NASA should copyright the story leading up to, including, and after the lassoing. They could then sell the stories to the film industry and merchandise like crazy to recoup some of the costs. To add a bit of color, they should recruit astronauts with dark pasts, a drinking problem, or who are Elmo.
I think the bugs will not be pleased :)
ImpactEffects
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
...What about the effect on global warming?
points to sky
Billy: You see those two rocks? Asteroids. I was an engineer working on them. First they just wanted to put one but I said, "Fellas, we're here. What the hell, throw the other one up". Turned out pretty well, didn't it?
Henry: Fantasy.
Earth–Moon L1 I mean.
Some would say that the Earth is our moon. But that would belittle the name of our moon, which is: The Moon.
Didn't we have this story a week or so ago? Then NASA wasn't actually commenting on the plan... Is the news now that they actually are considering the plan? Or is it that we're talking ion thruster now rather than Atlas-v?
FTFOA:
Nerds that don't remember their news are doomed to repeat the stuff that matters.
We can call the asteroid "Wormwood"!
"..NASA is mulling over their plan to..."
At NASA, we do a lot of looking at plans, ideas, proposals.. just because someone is looking at it doesn't mean much. Some group comes up with some idea, writes a report, sends it in. Then, someone at NASA finds some people to review it and comment on it. The original report and the comments wind up in some document repository or another. Perhaps some feedback to the original team. Inevitably, someone writes a paper and presents it at some conference.
Many, many years later, it might come up in the decadal survey as a potential mission. Those decadal surveys, as the name implies, happen every 10 years, and it's one of the big drivers for NASA's exploration plans. If it's not recommended by the survey, it's unlikely to happen.
http://sites.nationalacademies.org/ssb/currentprojects/ssb_056864 is an example...
For only $2.6 billion, sounds like a bargain to me. For some perspective, here's what else $2.6 billion can buy or is equivalent to:
- F22 Raptor
- About one day of War on Terror
- 60% of the money spent during the 2013 Presidential campaign.
- The Mars Science Laboratory
- Total worldwide box office revenue for Avatar
It will change the oceans attraction and the climate! Scary...
I'm not too crazy about this. How will it impact the tides and other ocean functionality. This doesn't sound like a very good idea.
I don't really see the point of astronauts visiting a rock that's smaller than they are. This is a waste of resources, there are plenty of small asteroids that come to Earth by themselves, why not study them?
I hate to say this but NASA is full of bureaucrats -- they are not the brightest lights on the block. At a conference in 1985 I met alot of NASA engineers and the brightest ones where hired by NASA but wanted to get a job in the contractors within 1-2 years. I was told NASA was brain dead. So why would we trust them to do this right? -- hey bureaucrats keep on building on the debt.
I read all these plans to send men to Mars or lasso asteroids, but we can't even get back to the moon.
It's like they delibrately suggest missions that can't be accomplished for decades. Sometimes I think it's because they're afraid of something going wrong and they'll get blamed, but if they chose a mission that nobody expects results for 30 or 40 years, they can spend all their time till retirement just planning and not building anything.
I heard you like Moons.
Considering how many "new" solar-orbiting bodies are still being discovered, and some of the near-misses of the last few years, can we be certain this project would not inadvertently de-stabilize one of those objects enough to pose significant danger to Earth?
That is a question that needs to be thoroughly addressed (or did they?).
YMMV
So why not have it orbit Earth? Is it the risk of crashing on Earth or into other orbiting space objects or is there some other explanation?
Not my idea. I saw a bit of the new movie version "The Time Machine". You just need to tell everyone that you are going to nuke the Moon, then nuke it and, voilà! Lots of asteroids to have fun with.
Maybe the dinosaurs could give us some tips. They tried the same thing about 65 million years ago. Hey, I haven't seen them in a while...
Table-ized A.I.
And how do we know it won't save us from an object that would otherwise hit us? Come on.
flyaway vs. program cost: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor
Nonetheless, I'd much rather that money went to the space program than the war "racket": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
For this reason: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
I think asteroid capture is a cool idea. However, it just brings closer the day where a single patient-but-psychopathic physics major with a laptop and a solar-sail-propelled spacecraft could slightly deflect a bigger asteroid and destroy all life on the planet. My guess for that is around 2050 (such a laptop would be more powerful than all of Google today), if humanity still exists the -- although it might take hundreds of years for a cheap spacecraft to do that. Although we'll probably reach the point where the average biochemistry major could wipe out the human race with an engineered plague first (2030?) -- which is a good reason to develop self-replicating space, underwater, and antarctic habitats first, and this project is a step towards that, and so probably worth the risk.
No one ever talked about the human genome project as like giving copies of the keys to your house away to every random stranger on the planet. But humanity has been protected through genetic security by obscurity, and that obscurity is rapidly being dispelled through all the best of intentions... (even though simply eating more vegetables, fruits, and beans, and getting enough vitamin D, iodine, and omega-3s will accomplish much but not all of the promises of genetic medicine). And that's not even talking about the threats of systems designed directly by the military as weapons of mass destruction or mass confusion...
So, we need to rethink our approach to security, emphasizing mutual security and intrinsic security, like I talk about at that essay. I can only hope the US or global defense establishment stops investing mainly in preparing to face 20th century threats and starts thinking about effectively preparing to deal with emerging 21st century threats. F-22 Raptors are just more "security theater" when major 21st existential threats are things like plagues, asteroids, nanobots, killer robots, deadly financial dogmas, and bureaucracies out of control.
But hey, I lost out on getting a PhD at Princeton in the 1980s on this stuff in part because in the 1980s I would not go along with the game there of justifying optimally picking on nickels before an existential steamroller (even though I missed out on understanding the power of networks):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
I can hope the same sort of social force and group think behind those financial threats that finally emerged in 2008 won't apply entirely to contemplating these existential threats still to come. We all need some security. The issue is how we go about getting it non-ironically.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
417 MT (Metric Ton) may sounds a lot but, please allow me to put it in another context ...
A typical mid-size ocean merchant vessel can carry cargo of 50,000 MT, plus or minus 10%.
417 MT is but 1% of the cargo load of a typical mid-size ocean merchant vessel of planet earth
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Jebediah Kerbal gives this two thumbs way, way up.
-Styopa
Send it around the sun one time, really close, before placing it in lunar orbit, and you'd have a thermal energy source of great usefulness.
In addition to all the other excellent reasons why this is such a good idea (yes I RTFA) there is one (or two) more.
It would provide a last(?) ditch means of protecting ourselves against a much bigger, real threat.
If we don't detect a big asteroid now on a collision course with earth, with at least 10 years of lead time then unless we're willing to use nukes which 1) may or not work depending on the composition of the asteroid 2) may make the problem worse by breaking it up, we're out of luck. Unless we have, conveniently, this nice big 500 ton rock which we can use to hit and redirect the incoming asteroid. Depending on many many variables like how far away it hits the incoming asteroid, the sizes of the two relative velocities, orbits and whatnot it could quite an effect. (Remember that it would be coming from its high lunar orbit so could hit the incoming asteroid with a relatively high transverse velocity).
It might be even be more effective a nuke because a nuke's energy, in the vacuum of space, might be all light and radiation with little propulsive effect (which is why Bruce Willis and gang had to actually land and bury theirs on the asteroid.). It would be like the difference between getting hit by a thrown firecracker or, a rock. Both might have roughly the same "energy" but one would have it in the form of an explosive bang and the other in kinetic (motion) energy.
Of course, this would in no means supplant a real planetary defense program like Spaceguard. But Spaceguard was never going to find 100% of all the asteroids so, like I said, this could be a last ditch defense. Anyway, it's just another possible use for having our own pet rock! :)
One more thought is that, if they decide to send this asteroid collector a bit further (okay much farther) out to the "snow line" where icy comets and asteroids that haven't had all their water evaporated are, they can bring back one that's loaded with FUEL and AIR. An icy 500 ton asteroid in lunar space would be just about the most valuable resource possible, it's got WATER which can be drunk, used for radiation shielding, and when electrolyzed, the oxygen can be breathed and the hydrogen used for fuel. (Also the hydrogen can be stretched even further by combining it with the carbon from a carbonaceous asteroid to make methane rocket fuel.).
Probably the existing spacecraft design doesn't have to be changed that much, the collection "bag" if silvered should keep the asteroid frozen on the long trip back to earth. (It'll also need bigger solar panels or a nuke and more xenon fuel). And the trip would be long, probably out beyond mars to where Ceres is. That's where the DAWN spacecraft is headed, to orbit the giant possibly icy asteroid. If we're really lucky, it'll find some small 7m icy mini-moons ripe for the picking.
Honestly though the distances are too far and our detection capabilities (it's hard enough finding 7m asteroids passing near earth let alone in the asteroid belt) too modest to make this a realistic goal for our first effort in asteroid collecting. Maybe version 2.0.
I pay my $10 per year to fund NASA and I am 150% ok with the government making everybody pitch in their small amount every year to human progress. I don't believe for a second it would be any better privatized... I do object to the privatization pushes going on in the USA to turn gov agencies and services into massive hiring bureaucracies that outsource all the work to contractors-- which do NOT compete for the progress of science but instead increase corruption and overhead while NOT sharing their work with the world. NASA used to attract the best and brightest to change the world for reasonable pay... the motives were to work on amazing stuff unavailable elsewhere as well as prestige. Not everybody is motivated by money, especially actually smart people.
Stop the bloody wars, and you fuckers can build 5 moon bases, 10 space stations, outpost on jupiter, and mars base/city.
Oh who cars if it costs 1000 billion per year. All that money is spent on wages that go to people who spend and support their local industries. Materials are cheap.
I'll tell you how to build a city on the moon, do it like nature uses dna to make trees or coral. Make 4 types of robots, that can mine the moon, melt regolith, shape it to sheets or blocks like lego. Then have 100000 little spider robots put those pieces together to make a shelter/building.
If said robot can be mass produced in china, then launch them at 100 per day to the moon, if 5% crash , who cares, send more.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
It seems like all they want to do is suck harder at the government t*t.
two recent SF projects come to mind:
1. Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets
2. Defying Gravity
both based on the premise of a manned Grand Tour of the solar system.
Defying Gravity, being a Hollywood project revolved around aliens. Space Odyssey was done as a mockumentary and looked quite plausible.
So I put a moon in orbit around your moon, so you can do a lunar expedition while you're on a lunar expedition.
Ok, so once the asteroid collector has delivered the asteroid to high lunar orbit, what does the spacecraft do then?
Well, if its got even a tiny fraction of its propellant left over (remember it just towed something maybe 100x its size clear across the solar system) , it slowly spirals down to low earth orbit and... REFUELS.
Now here's where things get interesting. Once it's refueled (remember its main consumable is up to 12,000 lbs. of Xenon, it gets its energy from solar power), it can do any number of things. Of course it could be sent out again to get another asteroid (including, as I mentioned in a previous post, one with precious WATER) but that might be boring. How about having it PAY FOR ITSELF by moving satellites from LEO to geosynchronous orbit. (This is very expensive as it typically requires an additional booster, I think the cost per pound is at least double that to low orbit). I think this market is on the order of $5B per year.
The reason why this would work is because the asteroid tug would clearly be capable of moving very(!) large payloads. It wouldn't even have to be very slow, if it can accelerate a 500 ton asteroid at 1/10,000th of a g, it could accelerate a 5 ton satellite at say 1/200th of a gee (taking into account the tug's own weight). So it could deliver the satellites in weeks if not days. Of course there would need to be a few minor design modifications to the tug. The collapsible "bag" would have to be removable and some sort of industry standard docking ports added. There would need to be some provision for refueling ports and critical components (gyroscopes, reaction wheels, electronics) would need to be replaceable/upgradeable like the Hubble space telescope. Of course servicing this "space tug" in this way is probably beyond the near term capabilities of robotics. Rather than this being a problem, it could be an opportunity -
- for the International Space Station to actually be USEFUL. Here it could serve as a fuel depot, servicing "garage" and interchange point for these "space tugs". The kind of problem that robotics can't handle yet are ideally suited for an astronaut with a wrench (and maybe some elbow grease). The fact that the main propellant for these tugs is Xenon, an inert noble element, makes handling the fuel much less problematic (no problems with corrosion or toxicity) and safer (no fear of explosive combustion). Even the fact that these tugs use ion thrusters would be an advantage meaning that everything would be happening very slowly, if one went out of control they could probably move the entire station out of the way (like they do when avoiding space junk). The station could also keep spare, interchangeable parts for these tugs such as additional "bags" or robot arms or other modules. In short, the ISS would have a PURPOSE.
With even a little thought, these space tugs have lots of additional uses. The same high power ion engines that can move a 500 ton asteroid could also send 500 tons of cargo cheaply (if slowly) to Mars. The same collapsible bag that can capture a tumbling asteroid can easily capture a much lighter piece of space junk. All it takes is for a government with foresight to make the initial investment that may (as I've suggested) quickly repay itself perhaps many times over. And isn't that the purpose of government (if not NASA)?
In the long term an asteroid capture makes sense.
1: Any long term space voyage needs a a ship that provides a lot of radiation shielding. An asteroid provides that.
2: Any large spaceship needs a lot of raw materials. An asteroid provides that.
3: A Saturn or SDL Very heavy lift rocket from earth can only deliver a few tons net to the Moons surface but can deliver 40 tons to an asteroid.
4: Long term space voyages such as cycler voyages to and from Mars, or the asteroid belt or out to Jupiter will require lots of everything and an asteroid can provide that.
5: Before humans can utilize either an asteroid or the moon, the robotic capture, modification and processing of asteroid material will require immense investment in robotic systems. This will help drive technological development back on earth, at far less cost and less destruction than war does.
Capturiing an asteroid and bringing it to a stable lunar,earth or legrange orbit is a project that makes sense
Face-palm! What could possibly go wrong with this....
"For example, it doesn't take a lot of research to find out that Earth routinely gets hit by objects of this size."
"routinely"? Really?
If such impacts were routine, we'd have noticed.
Let's use the 400 metric ton mass somebody above posted and figure out the energy of impact. MKS units.
E=(m*v^2)/2 (Joules)
400 T = 4e5 kilograms
Now we need a velocity estimate, which I'll low-ball at 10 km/sec. Meteors apparently have a velocity spread of from 10 - 70 km/sec or so, and the impactors at Meteor Crater (AZ) and Chixilub were estimated at about 11k/sec, so let's pick the low end.
V=10km/sec = 1e4 m/sec
V^2 = 1e8m^2/sec^2
so energy = 0.5*(4e5kg)*(1e8m^2/sec^2)
= 2e13 Joules
So would we notice this if it happened at all, much less "routinely"? Let's see, 1 kiloton of TNT yields about 4.2e9 Joules, so our energy yield is 2e13/4.2e9 = about 5e3KT, which is about 5 megaton(ne)s of energy release.
If 5 MT impacts were routine, we'd notice. Even assuming that we missed seeing the 70% that hit the ocean, we'd surely notice the remaining 30%.
I don't think these impacts are "routine" on time scales less than 10 generations. We'd remember.
Sorry to reply to my own post - I mistook the energy in 1 ton of TNT (4.2e9 Joules) as being the energy for 1 kiloton of TNT, so my energy estimate is 1000x too large. Actual energy release would be in the low kiloton range, which I agree we could easily miss if most of the energy were coupled to the atmosphere by an endoatmospheric burst.
Go up a few posts. It was opined that a solid-gold asteroid would be worth dragging back from space because sale of it would retrieve ten times the cost of the operation needed to do so. Somebody else pointed out that selling that much gold would depress the price and affect the profitability. I got curious (read: I was bored) enough to see if selling 500 tonnes of gold would indeed depress the world market. Googled around a bit. And discovered that for some fairly obvious, as well as for some non-obvious, reasons it became clear that it would easily be enough to skew the market. And maybe even enough to 'correct' it from it's distorted and manipulated condition. I dug up an interesting blog entry by Krugman on the topic.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
I could get behind this VERY easily. The paper outlines clearly how we could avoid any SyFy disaster movie scenario and instead create a very cool and very exciting opportunity to combine unmanned space flight and technology with our current plans to re-visit the moon. This mission would push an asteroid that is only 23 feet across to Earth. We could run trips to it, and we could resend the ship that brought the asteroid back out without expending any additional fuel to create liftoff. This is very cool!
There could be a valid argument for maintaining a collection of controlled small asteroids in near Earth orbit. When some "wild" asteroid will really threaten Earth, "our" asteroids would provide be a reservoir of mass and directed kinetic energy alreadily available in high orbit.
Given a few weeks or months of leading time, a variety of orbital and slingshot effects can be used to place "our" asteroids in the way the incoming wild asteroid. Parameters of the encounter are available, such as the distance from Earth and the angle of impact, so as to split the larger asteroid and change the orbit of the center of mass of its debris field. Combininig effects allows some minimization of damages to Earth.
This will also bring about a new space race because the chinese or the russians would never trust a minization of damages under the control of americans, and inversely. There might be a string of international treaties and regulations. India and Pakistan would find that their national pride demands that they too own a few asteroids each; then they would start to pass remarks such as "we won't nuke you, we will asteroidize you" or something like it.
Changing orbits is a slow process : weeks or months with ionic propulsion. There would be no surprise attack by anybody.
But, ooh, so much talk... A weirdly interesting future.
Is it difficult to simulate on Earth?
Casteism
Then they will put a meteor in orbit around the asteroid, and a satellite orbiting the meteor and then ...
We have to go deeper.