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NASA Unveils Two New Missions To Study Truly Strange Asteroids (space.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: NASA's next low-cost planetary missions will attempt to unravel the mysteries of some seriously bizarre asteroids. The space agency has selected projects called Lucy and Psyche via its Discovery Program, which funds highly focused space missions to destinations throughout the solar system. The Lucy project will investigate the Trojan asteroids, which share an orbit with Jupiter, while Psyche will journey to the asteroid belt to study a huge, metallic asteroid named 16 Psyche that resides there. Lucy is scheduled to launch in October 2021. If all goes according to plan, the probe will visit an asteroid in the main asteroid belt -- located between Mars and Jupiter -- in 2025, and then go on to study six Trojan asteroids between 2027 and 2033, NASA officials said. There are two streams of Trojan asteroids. One trails Jupiter, and the other leads the giant planet around the sun. Scientists think both streams may be planetary building blocks that formed far from the sun before being captured into their current orbits by Jupiter's powerful gravity. Psyche will explore one of the oddest objects in the solar system -- a 130-mile-wide (210 kilometers) metallic asteroid that may be the core of an ancient, Mars-size planet. Violent collisions billions of years ago might have stripped away the layers of rock that once lay atop this metallic object, scientists say. Psyche is scheduled to launch in October 2023 and arrive at the asteroid in 2030, NASA officials said.
This is truly great news!
At the rate NASA is making progress, it will only be 1,000 years after we are all dead that mankind will go to the stars!
Too bad we can't bring a humongous magnet for some of the more interesting experiments.
Low cost mission. Is Trump likely to cut into NASA budget? Or will the coming Chinese space plans be an incentive for Trump to push and encourage more ambitious space missions?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The asteroid finding satellite NEOCam was one of the candidates that didn't get selected, but it has strong institutional support at NASA. Jim Green announced that NEOCam would get one year of additional "Phase A" (i.e., life support) funding, presumably as they try and find a way to fund it.
Insert some fairly well founded logic here attempting to undermine NASA, the USA, and humanity in general.
Psyche 16 is a heavy mass of iron. Already well out of the gravity well of the Sun. Give me a few resourceful and creative engineers (The challenge will be way too demanding for AI and Too far away from earth for near real-time robotics) and all I need is an energy source. With our minds and Promethean effort Iwe can craft an iron or steel (using easily scavenged local carbon )space ship forged in space). Then we’ll use the energy source, magnetism from the conductive iron and Iron ions to create an impulse drive to power our beautiful large Beam and Plate habitat on an epic voyage !. It’s all straight forward conventional physics Steel water tanks we’ll fill on the fly from Ice we find drifting out there like cometary space icebergs.. atmosphere by electrolysis. Calling on all you brave sons of Pittsburg! Imagine what we can do! We’ll make the Martian look like the dirt farmer he was!
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
And of course some oligarchs will use this basic research to mine the asteroids and further demonstrate that publicly funded science doesn't get the returns it deserves :(
We've had hundreds if not thousands of years to solve the problems here on earth and havn't. It isn't a matter of money that's stopped it happening.
Don't shoot. We are part of waves of reinforcement missions geared toward your planet.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
The ISS has cost trillions
$150 billion. Dopy cunt.
Puts the rest of your bullshit in context. How d'you feel about military spending? A million a day to run air-con in Iraq? Shut the fuck up, twat.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
It is a Russian Death start set to invade Jupiter!
The invasion will start on January 21st 2017, just in time, as the mainstream press told us, for Trump to be crammed into his Darth Vador suit and make allegiance to Emperor Poutine.
I fully expect the surface to be pitted and covered in regolith/debris.
Which IMHO would actually be a good thing. If we're ever to engage in asteroid mining, the last thing you want is to be having to fracture and pulverize everything yourself; you just want to have to load it (which is hard enough in microgravity) into a mold, sinter it into an ideal reentry shape, and electromagnetically eject it onto an ideal Earth-crossing trajectory for controlled aerobrake/aerocapture (either one-stage: aerocapture straight to the surface, with a larger landing ellipse - or two stage: aerobrake to LEO, then do a timed burn to land within a very narrow ellipse). The latter requires a docking or disposable thruster(s) for each return, while the former can be a simple unguided projectile - so there's a tradeoff between how much land you have to allocate for your returns, and how much those returns cost per unit mass.
A landing ellipse on land doesn't need to be empty of people, but it needs to be able to be emptied of people; returns would arrive in waves, not at an even rate, so it'd be fine to continue using the land for farming, grazing, etc in the interim. An alternative would be to sinter enough voids into the reentry bodies so that they float, then land them in open ocean in a place where currents will concentrate them.
Asteroid mining is anything but a short term option. But it's interesting for the long term. You've got some very high concentrations of precious metals (and some gemstones, like peridot), concentrations that rival or exceed the best mines on Earth, with zero overburden. And products made from them would command a premium on the market - a huge premium in the early days.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
Watch the video AC linked to. Go to 20:00 if you can't stand the annoying shit and just need to see what was done.
You want to solve the world's problems? Cut the population down to 1% of its current size. It's going to happen anyway.
Somehow I get the impression this job can be done by some automaton (and not a very sophisticated one, mind you).
Challenge: write an autotroll (perhaps one that gathers trendy trigger words from other sources, perhaps Twitter). Bonus points if it's written in Brainfuck (perhaps you need some external storage).
Japan has already built an asteroid exploring probe, Hayabusa. NASA should hire Japan to build, and operate, another asteroid probe, instead of trying to build one itself.
It is important to learn to walk before you attempt to run. In case you cannot wait, we'd be happy to strap your ass to rocket and send you to the nearest star. Please write often, we'd love to hear how it is going.
We already learned to walk... you're probably a millennial who was not there on July 20th, 1969 when we took our first steps. That almost 50 years ago this year. Guess what we were learning to do in 1919, 50 years before that? We had just completed the first non-stop transatlantic flight.
50 years before that, the biggest deal in 1869 was closing on the funding for the Beach Pneumatic railway... and it was 10 years before Edison demonstrated his electric light bulb in Menlo Park.
We are sitting around these days, mostly staring at our belly button lint. But we are proud of ourselves, for using robots to do it. It turns out it's the same belly button lint that was there in 1969.
We seem to be saddled with an overabundance of one of:
1. Caution
2. Roboticists, sucking the funding out of everything interesting
3. People with sticks up their asses
Pick one, but we should have a colony on the moon already, if not Mars (at least a Phobos base for the asteroid mining fleet).
Maybe we can figure out the mystery about why the US spends more on its space program than any other country on earth, and then the mystery about why we have so little to show for it (on its own and compared to other countries).
If they keep poking around in the belt, they're liable to uncover a protomolecule, and then all hell's gonna break loose.
Aren't the rocks trailing Jupiter called Greeks? An homage to the Trojan War?
Flight was indeed largely conquered between 1900 and 1950.
Putting people into space by the 1970s.
The next challenge is not to repeat old firsts, but to create new ones.
Currently, that means smarter robots in space. Like Curiosity. Astronaut, like slide rules, are quaint but obsolete technology for space travel.
And the final challenge for mankind is to build computers smarter than ourselves. That is a little way off, maybe 50..100 years. Then people will be obsolete technology.
Nobody wants a moon colony populated by people because it would be very expensive yet completely pointless. The Moon was done long ago.
http://www.computersthink.com
"That's not a moon, that's a space station!"
Currently, that means smarter robots in space. Like Curiosity. Astronaut, like slide rules, are quaint but obsolete technology for space travel.
Not to be too impolite about things... but I kind of don't really give a sh*t about you putting a box with blinky lights on Mars. I have one of those in my closet, it's called an "Arris WiFi Cable Modem".
Unless there are people there to watch it blink, it might as well be a frigging brick.
I watched every damn Apollo launch. When I started school, and there was a launch, I had a note from my mother the next day: "Stayed home to watch the launch". I was always given makeup tests, but since 1/3 of the kids stayed out for the same reason, they eventually interrupted classes for the launches, even if they were "uninteresting" ones.
Who the heck stays home from school to watch the live video of a launch for a little box? Pretty much no one. If you care (which you likely don't, because no one cares about a brick), you watch the video later, on YouTube.
I think one of the reasons SpaceX tried to "stick" the water landing was that no one had done it before, and so the intent was to get people excited about watching things again.
It didn't really work, because it wasn't that exciting, after they blew the first one up.
Send a human to Ceres: my nieces and nephews are going to be staying home and watching the launch with me, even if I have to hog-tie their mother. They will also be watching the approach and landing on the asteroid itself.
Send humans to Phobos, or Mars itself: same thing.
Humans doing things is exciting. Robots operating as they are designed to operate is intensely boring.
The ESA robot mission to Mars has a malfunction? Who gives a crap. Apollo 13 has a malfunction? OMG, I don't know how I did it, but I'm pretty sure I was away like 76 hours straight, glued to the screen.
The incrementalists can all go scr*w themselves: If you all want to take "baby steps" to get from point A to point B, like NBill Murray in "What About Bob?": feel free to fund it yourself.
If, on the other hand, you want to make a "giant leap for mankind", we'll get behind you with the $$$.
P.S.: You can also fund yourself for a "giant leap for a brick"; no one cares if you put a Raspberry Pi on Mars. Really.