NASA Asteroid Capture Mission To Be Proposed In 2014 Budget

MarkWhittington writes "Included in President Obama's 2014 budget request will be a $100 million line item for NASA for a mission to capture and bring an asteroid to a high orbit around the moon where it will be explored by astronauts. Whether the $2.6 billion mission is a replacement or a supplement to the president's planned human mission to an asteroid is unclear. The proposal was first developed by the Keck Institite in April, 2012 and has achieved new impetus due to the meteor incident over Russia and new fears of killer asteroids."

Comments

Re:I block asteroids with my hosts file

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously.... What. The. Fuck.

Can you two homos just go make out on brokeback mountain already, and stop talking about how one of you misspelled "penetration", and how the other cockblocks with their hosts files while grabing the other's goat?

Goodness, it sure feels like being in a mountain range, trying to peer around those fucking orbital tether lengthed posts of pure premium bullsit the two of you somehoq manage to keep pushing out on demand. Shit stinks!

At this point, i'd be willing to risk the fucking extinction of all life on earth by redirecting siding spring C/2013 1A to miss Mars and land on both of your fucking heads instead.

The deaths of billions would be a small price to pay to shut you two cackling lovebirds up!

Re:no purpose

[Immerman]

Right. No big deal as medium-small asteroid impacts go. Had it instead come in at a steep angle and hit a city it would have done some damage.

Think of it this way - if we had seen it in time, and had the proven tech to divert it, would it have been worth the effort to divert? Probably not, much cheaper to replace some windows. Even a direct impact would only be mildly annoying unless it hit near something sensitive, might even through up enough dust to do a little local cooling and cloud seeding. Even if a lot of people died, people die all the time, on average about 1.8 every second of every day, and they get replaced almost three times as fast. If it costs a few billion dollars to keep that number from doubling for an hour or two, does it really make sense to do so? Obviously it can be a useful excuse if there are other motives in play, such as when the US started spending trillions of dollars to "retaliate" against a government unrelated to a handful of extremists who caused a half-hour or so worth of extra deaths, or if we were actually developing and testing the asteroid-capturing tech that will to let us expand off the planet. But when it comes down to using proven technology to divert a threat, it's going to come down to dollars and cents - the only way minor asteroids like this will get diverted is if we spot them many years ahead of time and can send out a small, cheap interceptor to deflect it, or if it's valuable and a good orbital capture candidate.