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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."
mostly annoying asteroid that broke Russian windows.
Right, the mostly annoying half megaton explosion that injured over a thousand people and hospitalized over a hundred, and caused tens of millions of dollars of property damage. Most of the damage was broken glass, but it did manage to collapse the roof of one factory. If it had managed to last another half a second or so before exploding, it probably would have killed a hundred thousand or more people. I guess, in the grand scheme of things, that might only count as mostly annoying, but not to the people who live there.
L2 is even more precious as it is the only fairly stable spot in the Earth-moon system where if you're not careful you fall into interplanetary space.
L1 through L3 are not stable points. L4 and L5 have weird dynamics, but things put there will stay there with extremely low delta v.
And you can "fall" into interplanetary space very easily (that is, with arbitrarily low, but well timed delta-v) from any of the Lagrange points. L2 is not unique in this respect.