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NASA Funds Projects For Asteroid-Capture Plan
An anonymous reader writes: NASA has announced funding for 18 different projects aimed at developing an asteroid retrieval mission. "The agency is working on two concepts for the mission. The first concept would fully capture a very small asteroid in free space and the other would retrieve a boulder off of a much larger asteroid. Both concepts would redirect an asteroid mass less than 10 meters in size to orbit the moon. Astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft launched on the Space Launch System (SLS) would rendezvous with the captured asteroid mass in lunar orbit and collect samples for return to Earth." Astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope have also identified and measured the size of a candidate near-earth asteroid. It measures roughly six meters in diameter, and seems to be held together lightly, possible as a "pile of rubble."
Now we're all going to die of an alien disease.
Doesn't NASA watch any sci-fi?
This yet another lame attempt by the all-powerful manned-spaceflight lobby at NASA to supply pork to politically powerful districts such as Houston. The SLS has been called the Rocket to Nowhere and this is an attempt to justify it. All this fooling around with an asteroid could be done for a fraction of the cost with robotic probes. And there is little gain scientifically from this mission. The NASA administrator Bolden, a big-time manned spaceflight guy, has said that there will be no more flagship planetary missions (such as major missions to Mars or Europa), but he is more than willing to fund this asteroid capture stunt. So he wants to sacrifice science for pork. Next year NASA/JPL will have robotic probes reach Pluto/Charon and Ceres, but all the administrator can talk about is this stupid asteroid stunt.
All the exciting missions lately have been robotic such as the Curiosity (MSL) Mars Rover, Cassini, Voyager and next year the Pluto/Charon and Ceres missions. NASA management, all ex-astronauts and fighter jocks, hate this because they want to push their manned pork such as the SLS and Orion, but the public just does not care; there is no science or excitement there. This asteriod missions, which has no scientific value, is intended to get the public excited about manned missions.....snore...
How much gravitational attraction does a six-meter pile of rubble even have?
This sounds more like a bunch of rocks that happen to be falling/floating in the same direction...
All this fooling around with an asteroid could be done for a fraction of the cost with robotic probes.
Yes... and no.
A significant portion of the proposed project is technology development. This mission puts together and demonstrates a large, high power solar-electric propulsion system, which would be a valuable tool for many missions, including human missions to Mars, or to anywhere. Then it gives us a target for a short-duration human exploration mission, testing the spacecraft concepts that could be accomplished,with a much less complicated mission than a Mars mission, or even a Mars fly-by.
In terms of step-by-step development and demonstration of technologies for exploration, the program makes a lot of sense.
You may or may not be in favor of human exploration of Mars, but if this really is a long-term goal of the space program, it is greatly beneficial to have technologies developed and tested first on missions that are somewhat less ambitious than the human Mars mission.
Well... It works in Kerbal Space Program.
Actually, they do. I recall seeing an interview with the people at NASA behind this project on CBS. They said that the goal would be to mine captured asteroids for two things: valuable metals (they specified platinum, but there are probably plenty of others) and ice. The ice is particularly important because it can be used to obtain hydrogen and oxygen, which most rockets use for fuel. The NASA guy CBS interviewed had a vision of miniature space stations orbiting asteroids that would serve as the space equivalent of gas stations for long-range spaceflights, but who knows how viable that is.
"The NASA guy CBS interviewed had a vision of miniature space stations orbiting asteroids that would serve as the space equivalent of gas stations..."
Sure, but will they have an Astro Chicken Game Console?
Don't forget carbon, because methane is hell of a lot more useful than hydrogen as a storable fuel.
Ezekiel 23:20
Remote control cars on Mars are boring. They do nothing to advance anything except some mild bickering over how common bacteria is in our solar system.
Asteroid capture does not do much by itself, but would serve as a meaningful proof of concept for the feasibility of extraplanetary construction. Many issues would still be unresolved, but it would show the availability of resources and provide a workspace to start testing ideas of how to extract, process, and manufacture with metals in a negligible gravity non-atmospheric environment.
Setting up gas stations in the asteroid belt could work quite well, I would think.
I begin to see the point of NASA's interest in mining the asteroids. It might be possible that water could be extracted from an asteroid by a solar powered satellite, then shipped by cheap, slow, unmanned rockets to rendezvous points for manned missions. Water has some excellent qualities for use as reactive mass in rocket motors, especially those with nuclear rather than chemical heaters, and a ship that only needed to carry enough reaction mass to get from one rendezvous to the next could open up the solar system to manned exploration very quickly. This would make a manned mission to Mars much easier.
But first there is a need to determine whether we have technology that can do the extraction, and whether there is enough water in the asteroids to make it worthwhile. Could a solar powered laser aimed at a point on an asteroid create a plume of water vapor that could be captured somehow and condensed into liquid or ice? Interesting concept...
Will
Now we're all going to die of an alien disease.
Doesn't NASA watch any sci-fi?
I think in two ways worst than an alien disease, that can be a huge problem if in wrong hands. The FIRST CASE SCENARIO is about miscalculation: capturing near Earth Asteroid is a complex challenge. One thing wrong and you could bombard Earth and cause serious problems (and billions of victims). The SECOND CASE SCENARIO is hypothetical: what about finding a lot of tons of one or more of the 8 most expensive elements in the periodic table: Au, Ag, Pt, Pd, Ir, Rh, Os and Ru (or the worst case scenario: only Au and Pt) in the captured asteroids. And what if the company wants to "integrate" its achievement in the Earth economy? :) I know that, if used with wisdom this entrepreneurship can help humanity take a long leap in good, technology and expansion (and establishment) to other orbs in our Solar System, but things can go wrong (or intentionally wrong) and we need some guarantee.
My idea was to use a nuclear powered craft that once it latches on to its first asteroid, it then extracts small pieces of it, and fires them out like projectiles to move it to the next asteroid. You could even launch asteroids back towards earth if you're feeling lucky :P I don't hear anyone talking about using Asteroid rocks as the kinetic matter for propulsion. I just thought it was a unique thought to share with the community.
God spoke to me
The landing of the "boring" remote control car (the Curiosity rover) was a huge international event with more publicity than the ISS has ever had in its whole lifetime. It must have ticked off Bolden and the rest of the manned-spaceflight lobby at NASA to no end. You seem to forget that Star Trek was not a documentary; robots can do anything man can do and much better at a tenth or hundredth of the cost. The only science that the ISS, Orion, SLS, and this asteroid stunt will accomplish is be research on humans in space. Snore....
Pure pork that's all. The money would be better spent on Mars, or Europa missions or even Enceladus or Titan. The current NASA administration (and White House) have been a disaster for planetary science. They are not putting anything in the pipeline....
(they specified platinum, but there are probably plenty of others)
Almost any platinum-group metals will be desired and mined if they can get to it.
First there is a need to identify what exactly these manned missions are going to accomplish. Saving humanity ? No, the earth is a much better bet. Exploration ? No, much better and cheaper with robots. What else ? And without extended manned missions, what's the point of mining the asteroids ?
I think death by accidental asteroid impact is a more likely danger from this plan.
That asteroid may just be a collection of small rocks held together with a VERY small gravitational glue, not some single big rock. One may need a bag to caputure it and move it anywhere. Tyvec or some metal mesh may do.
robots can do anything man can do and much better at a tenth or hundredth of the cost.
Which robots can cover dozens of miles in a few days, while collecting the most interesting scientific specimens from that area?
The big disadvantage of robots is that they're damn slow. A human could cover the distance the Mars rovers have travelled in a day, but you could put a hundred or more rovers on Mars for the cost of putting one human there.
Is this the capture tag and release type, or Capture rendition and Gitmo?
You can't capture a 10-20 mile per second asteroid, unless you speed up to that speed, and go along with it, or you ping pong it with weapons/bullets/objects to another desired speed, but if you're not going the same speed, it flies by you off and away like an ambulance with a siren. The best way to capture asteroids is to seek ones with near-miss orbits with the Moon or Earth, like (i'm talking shooting stars in August, when Earth flies through that domain) and modify their path to impact directly into the Moon. Kaboom, captured, even if you have to dig deep for it, and it splashes all over the place in the form of a crater. In fact why bother ping pong-ing asteroids into the Moon, when it already has all these craters. Maybe that's what the most detailed ever survey of the Moon by the Chinese a few years ago was about, heavy metal stuff - osmium (22.6), iridium (22.4), platinum (21.45), rhenium (21.04), Uranium (20.2) (usually combined with oxygen, and then not so dense), tungsten (also with oxygen) (19.35), gold (19.32) (btw archimedes' Eureka! method may not have been accurate if the king's crown was made of tungsten, but then the color would be off, it's hard to forge gold color and forge the density too; you could also try blends of copper and say, uranium (not being a precious metal like gold), but you probably could not get the color and density both right), The list continues, but not that heavy anymore: tantalum (16.65). thorium (15.4), mercury (13.55, but very volatile), hafnium, rhodium, ruthenium, palladium, lead (11.35), silver (10.5), molybdenum (10.22), copper (8.96), nickel (8.9), iron (7.87 sp.gr (specific gravity)),
You can use 100% of an asteroid's mass for useful items. After you extract water, carbon, and metals, the leftover slag can still serve as radiation shielding. Shielding is needed anywhere above low Earth orbit that you plan to spend much time at.