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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."
This is a program designed to be cut, to show that this administration is being 'fiscally responsible'... I expect many such 'pie-in-the-sky' projects to be proposed, only to be cut at the altar of fiscal responsibility... And blame the minority party for the cut as well.
Hey, if they can count as savings the money they don't spend on wars that have ended, why not propose wild plans to pump up the savings?
Do you know how much (in inflation-adjusted dollars) we have saved since we stopped fighting the Second World War these last 65+ years?!?!?!
Ken
". . . can I keep it . . . ?"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The purpose is to get more votes. How much of a mission do you think they're going to get from $100 million anyway? Or even $2.6billion, which makes the assumption that NASA will actually get that money.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
An asteroinaut?
Silence is a state of mime.
I think Obama has a ways to go to catch up to George Bush on vacation time.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
L4/L5 is valuable real estate. First nation to park a base there owns it.
We should send two.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Seriously, wouldn't sending a handful of robotic spacecraft to characterize larger asteroids be much more worthwhile? While it could be argued that astronauts on the surface of Mars with good geologic training and tools could be more productive than a robot, I'm not sure what value sending astronauts to such a small asteroid in lunar orbit really adds.
The asteroids that really threaten Earth are an order or two of magnitude bigger -- a hundred meters to a few kilometers in size. A 7 meter asteroid may give us some insight into their composition, but it would be better to actually go an analyze the actual type of asteroids we are worried about. Knowing details of their structure and how they are held together could immediately eliminate some solutions for diverting their course if the need ever arises and provide insight that could spark creative solutions that haven't yet been thought of. This kind of work could actually be done much cheaper with robots than astronauts if what we really care about are actual results.
Human's have to get out there. Not as entertainment, but because if humans remain exclusively on this rock and in near earth orbits, humans are a sitting duck. The lessons learned in getting humans into low earth orbit, then high earth orbit, then to establish permanent bases on the Moon and Mars, are going to be used to develop longer term programs for human interstellar travel, exploration and in time colonization.
Or we can just develop robots to go out and do that for us and roll over here on earth and give up.
You never know...
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. Every other place but this requires significant delta-v to escape the Earth's or the moon's gravity. Here though, just drift a little too far from the moon and away you go.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I don't mind if we send out robots first to make it safe and comfy for the humans who follow. As long as we get moving.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
It's a handy thing to practice catching, and a handy thing to have in orbit to practice refining fuel, but L2 is not the place to do it. L1 and L2 are extremely unstable, you have to continuously consume fuel to remain there, though you can reduce the amount by orbiting them. L3 is better, but on the opposite side of the primary. L4 and L5 are where you can actually store stuff stably - that's where asteroid fields tend to naturally accumulate.
Where L2 is useful is to hide something from the primary - for example space telescopes orbiting the Earth-Sun L2 remain constantly shielded from the sun by the Earth's shadow. Or in space-elevator scenarios, where for example a cable extending from he Moon through the Earth-Moon L1 or L2 points will hang stably in tension.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think you mostly nailed it - L1 is great as a pass-through point for a lunar elevator, which could potentially extend all the way down to geostationary orbit, obviating the need to each orbital velocities for an Earth-Moon transit. Probably *the* prime piece of orbital "real estate". Not really anything special otherwise, after all the Earth and Moon already have line of site with each other.
An L2 halo orbit would be handy for communication with the far side of the moon, though a simple collection of 3+ satellites in lunar orbit would do much the same for a far larger area with less transmission lag time, and any lunar communication satellites would destroy the radio "quiet spot" potential of using it for telescopy completely shielded from basically all earthbound and orbital signal sources. Could also send another tether through the point itself, but I don't see that that is really all that useful - a low orbiting tumbling cable space elevator would be far cheaper and more effective for launching stuff from the moon's surface out of Earth space.
L4 and L5 are handy gathering points since stuff will tend clump together and they make a pair of nice big targets for incoming asteroid captures and the like.
L3 is... just a place that's there. Can't really think of any special use for it beyond being a focal point on the Interplanetary Transport Network along with the other L-points. After all, if you're just putting something in orbit any orbit will do, and unlike L3 most of them don't require any appreciable station-keeping.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.