Slashdot Mirror
NASA's ARM Will Take a Boulder From an Asteroid and Put It In Lunar Orbit
coondoggie writes NASA officials today said they have picked the specific asteroid mission and offered new details for that mission which could launch in the 2020 timeframe. Specifically, NASA's associate administrator Robert Lightfoot said the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) will rendezvous with the target asteroid, land a robotic spacecraft on the surface, grab a 4 meter or so sized boulder and begin a six-year journey to redirect the boulder into orbit around the moon for exploration by astronauts.
So the Moon will have its own moon now?
"Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." -- Isaac Asimo
Throwing rocks is all fun and games until someone breaks a window on the ISS.
American aerospace contractors are displeased to note that NASA plans to have the Asteroid Redirect Vehicle fabbed on a 20nm process by TSMC, rather than more traditional launch partners...
Personally, I would have tried to use x86. Nothing wrong with ARM as such, but for serious heavy lifting x86 still is better.
you know, maybe the one the asteroid really, really likes.
Why not just examine the asteroid where it is? Possibly bringing samples back to earth, if really necessary.
How does having an astronaut in a clumsy suite help?
In other news, Ni!SA (formerly NASA) has cancelled their plans for a mission to cut down the tallest tree in the forest with a herring, in favor of a mission to acquire a shrubbery and return it for study.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
This is starting to sound a lot like something out of Kim Stanley Robinson's R/G/B Mars trilogy. :-)
... it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that orbitals are dependent on other orbitals.
I know damned well, given the difficulty of solving the three body problem, that NASA doesn't know what effect relocating an asteroid will have on other objects.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Just what we need is more junk orbiting the moon or earth. JUST PLAIN STUPID AS AN AMERICAN CAN BE!!!
Do you explore a 4 meter boulder? Or do you just examine it?
What astronauts exactly? And why put something in the path of possible future moon missions (made by perhaps smarter countries than the USA)
Meteor blitzkrieg!
When Skynet goes live, it will learn from NASA's redirecting of rocks. The next extinction will not be a random act.
I hear holiiwood is making that one into a movie...sounds like a great weapon to me....
seriously, this is retarded.
Honestly, its a wicked idea however the use of Humans to execute the material retrieval for analysis does make much sense unless they are doing active and repetitive analysis at the captured space boulder.
Its seems more intuitive to just fly some robots up to do the capture and send back the samples back to Earth as needed?
I'll bite: Roger the Shrubber
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Last year the National Research Council released a lengthy and highly influential Brief on the current state of NASA and the USA and future near-term 50 to 150 year prospects on just what is achievable and what can be accomplished.
The current NASA and the current State of the US economy and society did not far well.
Actually the report condemned NASA and the USA social order and economy.
Result: 150 year to a Moon mission, at best.
Wonderful.
The USA need not throw money at Elon Musk and his "fly-by-night" companies! They are wasteful and irreverent!
Why? They don't know what they are doing, other than spending taxpayer cash, and they even don't know how to get the Moon by any means.
Ha ha
...but it's not.
We dreamed of going to the moon, then Mars. Then NASA decided they'd harness an asteroid to "develop technologies". Now we're going to move a rock piece from an asteroid to a moon orbit, and then study it! How far we have fallen, what a joke.
Mini-moon. *pinky*
its like an axis of evil, but without GWB and the evil rotating about each other.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
...because you can lose your ARM that way.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This will make the asteroid a moon of Luna, making Luna a PLANET, which will make the Earth... a STAR! Hope your basements are all lined with asbestos because it's about to get HOT here! If you thought too much CO2 was making the earth warm, wait until the core begins fusing elements into heavier ones! Then you'll see HOT!
Or will this make the moon a Dwarf Planet? After-all, it will have its own moon. Otherwise we may need even more new definitions.
But on the plus side, calculating the orbit of the asteroid around the sun will prove a new and fun headache for astrophysicists. Think about it. Luna's path around Sol is basically like a series of arches as it zips around the gravitational center of the Earth-Luna system... now there's this object going around the moon...
OOOH! Will this thing be VISIBLE in the night sky with the naked eye? That'd be a sight... tell me their going to put its orbit so that the plane is perpendicular to a line drawn between Earth and Luna?!?? That would look really pretty cool, right? It would also put to bed all the rumors of us having never reached the moon... If you see something new orbiting it, it would become pretty obvious that as a minimum, we could reach at least THAT far... (OTOH, who cares what Luddite morons think?!?
Yes another lame attempt by management at NASA to create pork missions to keeps its flagging manned space Directorate relevant. NASA management is dominated by manned mission people who are forever dreaming up schemes to funnel more billions to manned missions when the real science (Mars rovers, Europa, Cassini, etc.) is being done by robots.
I think there's already a 2030 mission in the works to send the boulder back with flowers, chocolates, and an apology letter inscribed on a golden disc that reveals a YouTube compilation of Carl Sagan quotes if placed in a laserdisc player. (The instructions on the sleeve for constructing such a device simply say "This product has been discontinued" in a mixture of pulsar coordinates and atomic oscillations.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
When this administration cancelled the Constellation program (The bi-partisan Moon-then-Mars program of the immediate post-Columbia era) there were plenty of people in congress in BOTH parties who rebelled. The congress mandated the new SLS rocket (championed in the senate by Nelson (D-FL) and Hutchison (R-TX)) and kept pressing the Obama admin to explain it's plans; the Obama admin had cancelled Constellation, and all other manned program activity except the ISS which it intended to support for a few years before splashing it into the Pacific. At first, the administration dismissed the Moon (Obama gave a speech in Florida saying, essentially, "been there, done that, no reason to go back") and started making vague claims about a Mars plan (with no budget, no timeline, no hardware proposals, etc).
As congress continued to press the issue, the administration continued to fight the SLS and claimed it was dedicated to developing "new technologies" (with no specifics and no committments) and then they finally rolled-out an "Asteroid Rendezvous Mission" at a presser in which they had leacked that this would quiet the critics. They said this would be a stepping-stone to Mars by requiring a minned Orion capsule to fly into deep space for months to an asteroid where astronauts would sampl it and do some science and then return to Earth. "Much more difficult than the Moon" they insisted but not as tough as Mars, so therefore a worthy step along a path to Mars. Unfortunately, as time has passed, the administration has reduced it to "a robot will go grab a rock from an asteroid and put it into lunar orbit where astronauts will visit it" - which makes it NOT a worthy shakedown for deep-space use of Orion, EASIER than a moon mission, and NOT a step on any path anywhere (certainly NOT to Mars).
ARM is now just a PR stunt and a place-holder. Obama will finish his 8 years in office without a manned post-shuttle NASA mission, and without having put NASA on a path to ANYWHERE. The next admin will wisely cancel ARM (which is fine since no real effort has gone into it yet). Happily, the next president (whoever it is, and whichever party he/she is from) WILL inherit the "Senate Launch System" (not a perfect launch vehicle, but the most-powerful ever built) and be able to assemble a program of his/her choice around it. For probably the first time in my life I will type: "Thanks, Senators!" (it MAY be a horse designed by a committee (i.e. a Camel) but it's certainly better than nothing, and Camels ARE optimal for some things)/p?