Slashdot Mirror
NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission May Not Actually Redirect an Asteroid
MarkWhittington writes: When President Obama first proposed visiting an asteroid in his 2010 speech at the Kennedy Space Center, many assumed that the mission would be a deep space mission to an Earth-approaching asteroid in its "native orbit" in voyage taking weeks. Then, NASA dropped the idea in 2013 favor of the Asteroid Redirect Mission in which a tiny asteroid would be diverted to lunar orbit to be visited by astronauts. Now, according to a Thursday story in Space News, the ARM might take place without redirecting an asteroid.
Imagine if this asteroid just falls into Earth ? What will happen to them ? : Asteroid on Earth
Did anyone really think that NASA was seriously going to not only divert an asteroid to lunar orbit, but also send astronauts there??? NASA hasn't put anyone in lunar orbit in over 40 years. And they haven't even been able to put an astronaut in LEO for years.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Examiner should redirect the "journalists" to a Word Processor, and Slashdot should redirect all editors to /dev/null
I love how the article mentions that the other two options, visiting an asteroid in the originally proposed manner or returning to the moon, are going to be more expensive than the current project.
Given the fact that the current project will no longer do what it was originally intended, nor what it's named after, I imagine that yes, it would be cheaper than actually doing what was originally intended. Visiting a damn asteroid. It's like project is taking a queue from how the government works and getting money by claiming or misleading in one direction and then doing something different.
If it's really just a test of solar electron propulsion, how about we call it that and clearly state that is the actual mission, with some possible other benefits, versus the alternative. It's not like with the Mars Rovers they claimed they would do all the things that they are now managing to accomplish because they've performed better than expected. No, the project was billed for what they thought they could do and everything else is an added benefit. Lets not pollute the scientific community more than we have to with backdoor political tactics.
There it is! It has water, Helium-3, oxygen in the rocks. WTF is the problem?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Missions in preparation for going to Mars, what a waste. We aren't going to Mars in this century.
Besides, what does Mars have that the moon doesn't? A little more gravity? Shorter days -- that you wouldn't appreciate anyway, buried under your radiation shielding? A smattering of useless atmosphere?
We should develop extra terrestrial habitation technology on the moon first. It is incredibly conveniently close to Earth.
Yeah, and the Navy hasn't put anyone into permanent underwater habitats since the 1960s. So what? They did it, they collected the data, and concluded it was useless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just like sending people to the Moon.
There's nothing out there. Stop living in the past, waxing nostalgic over naive 1960s space fever.
Get over it.
This has all the signs of managers dumbing down projects to reduce risks and their exposure.
NASA's budget will shrink so much that the asteroid will become a basketball being diverted into a hoop at Cape Canaveral.
Rather than allow representatives to battle back and forth, it would be nice if there were a federal ballot to vote on such issues:
A. Land on asteroid
B. Land on moon
C. Do neither (save the money)
Table-ized A.I.
Obama doesn't even care what's happening in other countries (unless they have golf courses), why would he give a shit about space? If you think this policy is coming from NASA, you're deluded.
We can't fire a broadside from a turret of 16" cannons either, but I don't see that as a real impediment.
It's amazing how NASA has gone from a genuinely benign government agency advancing the sciences to a parasitic organization that acts a distributor of government pork. And they have a lot of good PR for what they do - hordes of nerds echoing insanely stupid sentiments like 'penny on the dollar!!!'
It was sad enough when NASA's so-called 'mission to prepare for Mars' was actually a pathetic plan involving moving a tiny asteroid to Earth/Lunar orbit and then sending some astronauts up there to take selfies. But now the mission has been downscaled even beyond that level, to where they're basically fine if they can just get a electric propulsion system to work. This would be akin to downscaling the Apollo program to a test-stand demonstration of a rocket engine firing.
End NASA's manned space program. Fire NASA management. Focus on the stuff NASA does best (robotic exploration). Fuck the congresspeople who piggyback on enthusiasm for space to send money to their own districts.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Robotic exploration is EXTREMELY limited. The farther away the object you want to study, the more limited the kind of science you can make with a robot. A team of four scientists with a descender module and a rover for one of them can replicate the last 50 years of mars exploration in 3-4 days in orbit and 1 day on surface. 4-5 days to get the same science we gathered and much much more.
> The farther away the object you want to study, the more limited the kind of science you can make with a robot.
And that's even more true for manned exploration...
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
This assumes that the fucking GOP will quit trying to harm private space. But Bigelow and musk want to go there then. Bigelow is counting on this to drive all nations to use their inflatable space stations. Sadly, the GOP wants to kill off private space and continue push money into their SLS nightmare.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Lame excuses to continue funding pointless manned porky missions when all the real science is done with unmanned robotic probes.
LEO is low earth orbit, not lunar orbit.