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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
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.
That got me thinking about something from 3001 (not that good a read, but still) wherein humans had been dropping comets onto Venus to slow terraform it. I wonder how many we'd have to drop onto Mars to make it a little more liveable there...
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
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.
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
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?
As a fellow diver who understands physics, none at all.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Consider newton's law of universal gravitation.
The effect applied is equivalent to the gravitational constant, multiplied against the product of the two gravitating masses, divided by the square of the distance between them.
Eg, waaaaaaaaaay out at the moon's lagrange point, and weighing in at a paltry 500,000kilos... that rock isn't going to do much.
It wouldn't even displace a single millimeter of ocean water at that distance.
Are you..serious? are you SERIOUSLY concerted about the tide being impacted by a 7m object orbiting the moon?
It's amazing you live through any dives.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Mars already has a large extant of iron and oxygen on its surface. It is why it is red. (Iron III oxide.)
For venus, I could see it dropping to "still bitching hot, but cool enough to work with on the surface with robots" in about 2000 years.
Venus' surface temp is just a few degrees centigrade below the thermal decomposition temperature of aramid plastics. (Related to kevlar and pals.) Venus has a similar overall quantity of nitrogen in its atmosphere as earth does, just diluted by considerable excess of carbon dioxide.
The secret to venus is to sequester the carbon.
Engineering an extremophile atmospheric microbe to colonize the tops of the sulfuric acid cloud layer (were it's a nice, sunny 70F or so, at earth sealevel pressures.) That uses a stable sulfur cycle based derivitive of photosynthesis, that is engineered to produce aramid plastics, would do just that.
Lacking any natural predators, and having a huge petri dish to colonize, with an excess of "food", the little bitches would rapidly "snow" out thermally stable plastic molecules and deplete the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and thereby puncture the thermal equilibrium of the planet.
The issue is the hydrogen scarcity. The microbes would have to be able to produce their own water from their sulfur based respiration cycle from sulfuric acid, excrete sulfur dioxide, and sequester the water inside their cellular membranes. This means they would have to be extraordinarily robust in the face of anhydrous sulfuric acid. That alone is a pretty impressive feat to accomplish with engineered biology. I was thinking that the microbes could use a heavy metal complex with lead to reduce the chemical activity of their cellular membranes, and use of the aramid plastic as internal skeletal structures might work. (One of the interesting features on venus is lead sulfide snow. It volatizes on the surface, then crystalizes in the atmosphere. This makes it a potential raw material for the microbes to use. Lead is very resistant to acidic attack.)
Releasing such microbes on venus would cause a runaway reaction in the atmosphere, transforming venus from a cloudy hot furnace, into a hellish sea of acidic gel oceans, and do so very quickly.
... they should recruit astronauts with dark pasts, a drinking problem, or who are Elmo.
But you repeat yourself...
Make all the robots run the same direction. It should act like a hamster in its wheel.
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)?
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.