NASA Visualizes Asteroid Grab Mission

fergus07 writes "NASA has released new concept images and animations outlining one version of its plan to capture an asteroid with an unmanned craft. The scenario presented for a possible mission around the year 2025 involves literally bagging an asteroid in a huge inflatable cylinder and returning it to lunar orbit for astronauts to study."

Comments

Funding will be cut

[SpaceMonkies]

Just like has happened over and over and over again, as soon as the next president gets into office the funding will be cut and the program cancelled. The Moon missions were a fluke of timing and circumstances, and nothing so grand is likely to be repeated anytime soon. Space is now becoming the playground of capitalism rather than the purvey of the government, and I think NASA is going to become an obscure part of the space race within a few decades.

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Re:Very dangerous

[Giant Electronic Bra]

You wouldn't want to be anywhere near where it hit, but agreed, the overall effect would be small and chances are it would hit a remote region where no significant damage would result.

My guess would be that the whole thing would be done on the basis of 'zero risk'. At NO point would the asteroid even transiently pass through a configuration where it would impact at all. This isn't as hard as it might sound either. Surely there is SOME orbit within the Earth/Moon system that can be achieved under that criteria. Once you are in ANY Earth/Moon orbit transitioning to other orbits safely should be relatively easy. Notice that the NASA blurb shows the asteroid in a counter-rotating distant Lunar orbit, one which would be pretty safe presumably. As long as you have a Constellation configuration with 10 or so days of transit time capability it really doesn't much matter exactly what the orbit is, you can get there.

So, I would STRONGLY suggest that this whole program is being proposed in a safe manner where impact is simply not possible. The 'tractor' capturing spacecraft could fail at any point and wherever the asteroid went would be OK.

That being said, it is true that statistically speaking any random orbit probably is more likely to lead to an impact than whatever orbit any random object is currently in. However NEOs are ALREADY generally in transient pseudo-stable orbits, so it probably doesn't make much difference. Obviously if you start pushing main-belt asteroids around its a bit different. Still, bad orbits are a very small subset of all orbits.