Slashdot Mirror
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.
Water on Earth is cheap and plentiful
Water in Earth orbit on the other hand is neither.
From February 2013:
"The 150-foot-wide (45 meters) asteroid 2012 DA14 — which will zoom within 17,200 miles (27,000 kilometers) of Earth on Friday, marking the closest approach by such a large space rock that astronomers have ever known about in advance — may harbor $65 billion of recoverable water and $130 billion in metals, say officials with celestial mining firm Deep Space Industries."
http://www.space.com/19758-asteroid-worth-billions-2012-da14-flyby.html
Yeah, that's petty expensive water and any value it may be said to have relies on there being a market in space. There is not.
Let's say it's essentially solid ice. That would be about 15000 cubic meters of ice, so they're pricing it at at least 4.3 million dollars per cubic meter, or 4.3 dollars per liter. So yeah, pricey water under the best assumption. More likely it's mostly rock like other near-earth objects.
Now let's say it's mostly rock. It would have to be some pretty damn special rock to be worth $8.6 million per cubic meter.
These numbers were simply made up by people who are interested in doing it for the sake of doing it as long as somebody else pays 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.