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MIT Professor Advocates Ending Asteroid Redirect Mission To Fund Asteroid Survey
MarkWhittington writes Professor Richard Binzel published a commentary in the journal Nature that called for two things. He proposed that NASA cancel the Asteroid Redirect Mission currently planned for the early 2020s. Instead, he would like the asteroid survey mandated by the George E. Brown, Jr. Near-Earth Object Survey Act of 2005, part of the 2005 NASA Authorization Act, funded at $200 million a year. Currently NASA funds the survey at $20 million a year, considered inadequate to complete the identification of 90 percent of hazardous near-Earth objects 140 meters or greater by 2020 as mandated by the law.
There's no profit to be made on determining which asteroids may or may not kill us all. There IS profit to be made on mining asteroids.
It's hard to get an idea pushed forward if you can't show people the money.
... inadequate to complete the identification of 90 percent of hazardous near-Earth objects 140 meters or greater by 2020 as mandated by the law.
This is the problem with Congress. How the hell do you make a law saying you need to identify 90% of something we can't validate at all? Who's going to say when you reach 90%? If we get clobbered by a rock it's clearly part of the 10% we didn't know, gee sorry.
I refuse to sign
A toilet big enough to flush $200 million per year. We should probably fund a study to create one.
It makes total sense. Why fund a redirect project if you're not even aware of anything that needs redirecting? And if you put the money into the survey and actually find something that needs redirecting, I doubt you'd have a problem getting a budget for it. ;-)
Perhaps intentionally, the blurb above completely ignores that Prof. Biznel's entire point is that we should be going after the asteroids that already pass close by. He wants us to play with these things, he just thinks it's a waste of money to send a probe far away to grab one when we could much more cheaply grab one that's already passing through. In order to have a decent chance of planning such a mission, we need to have a more complete survey of the asteroids that do pass close by which, he mentions, is already mandated by law (and we're not going to reach that goal at current spending levels).
He has been saying this for a while, most recently (to my knowledge) at the recent Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) meeting in DC. I was there and have to say that the community (at least, the sample of the community in that room) did not come to even rough consensus on his proposal, and was in fact split roughly 50-50. There is, however, a pretty strong consensus on the funding of a asteroid survey mission, an infrared telescope on an interior orbit to the Earth to find most of the possible "city-buster" NEA. This is pretty much what the B612 foundation is proposing, but they haven't raised the money yet, nor is on any NASA funding plans.
My own personal opinion, FWIW, is that Binzel is wrong and that the ARM mission is a first good step to Mars.
If he's so concerned, perhaps he should donate his time and form a non-profit organization which solicits donations to do the survey. It's how the republicans have suggested we deal with homelessness, child nutrition, mental health, and the arts. Why should his pet project/idea get a larger share of federal dollars?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The Asteroid re-direct mission is a pork mission to push money for more pointless manned missions. Binzel is 100% correct; the money would be much better spent on robotic missions, but, alas, NASA is run by pilots and beholden to the manned mission lobby.
If you build a successful asteroid mining industry, then you can be damned sure that there's going to be a ton of effort put into surveying as many asteroids as possible. It will necessarily follow.
This is just another government program funded by your tax dollars that will go "Dark". Meaning their original mission will be fulfilled to the fullest and even taken beyond the original for scientific discovery only to be known by dark agencies and the shadow military government. This MIT professor is just on the military industrial complex's/Cia's payroll.
It happens all the time, a project is announced dead, when in fact its fully alive, just not available to the people who funded it (the public).
Dirty shit huh?
Sending humans to sample/mine asteroids?
Better done robots that don't breath/sleep/eat/fight with each others.
The B612 / Sentinel program (see sentinel.org) proposes to complete the asteroid survey mission at a total cost of under $500 million, and is currently collecting private donations to launch and complete the misson. This proposed cost is a tiny fraction of the $200 million per year that this MIT prof is suggesting is required.
So here's a no-brainer proposal - divert a fraction of the NASA mission cost so that the Sentinel mission can be completed without blowing a giant hole in NASA's bloated budget. The Sentinel mission isn't completely independent of NASA in any case, as it depends on usage of the NASA deep space communication network.
Unfortunately, NASA money would come with giant strings attached to it, and those strings would likely make the Sentinel mission get bloated up toward the NASA mission cost. The Sentinel program is proposing to control costs by for example, having a private company, Ball Aerospace, built the satellite in a manner that they already have expertise to complete. This isn't the way public programs get run - such as making sure it gets built in some powerful politician's home district or include some sexy new technology that will bloat the cost.
So find the asteroids that are going to kill us early enough and mine them until they are small enough to not be a threat.