NASA mulls plan to drag asteroid into Moon's orbit

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23039-nasa-mulls-plan-to-drag-asteroid-into-moons-orbit.html#.U15Ld6YjsaY

by ColinWright • 12 years ago

43 61 12 years ago

JoeAltmaier11• 12 years ago

Why go all that way (to the asteroid belt) and back, and stop two doors down? Bring it into earth orbit! Or is that not politically correct? Because the risks are indistinguishable.

ColinWright3• 12 years ago

My thoughts ...

Having it in Earth orbit is no great challenge - better to have it further out of the gravity well to be a better staging post, and there's more to be learned from having to go back and forth to it further out.

Look at the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. Each one was specifically designed to learn something new that was essential for the Moon landing. This seems designed for maximum learning and not just for the individual challenge.

JoeAltmaier11• 12 years ago

Doing it at all is so near impossible at current technology levels as to be a pipe dream. To dream of putting further obstacles in our path is pointless.

You want to practice remote mining, do it on the moon, or at the bottom of the sea, or in a deep-core mineshaft here on earth. All simpler than going to the asteroid and bringing back gigatons of rock.

rtkwe2• 12 years ago

They're not going all the way out to the asteroid belt, 1999 AO10 orbits between Venus and just beyond Earth's orbit. As for the risks there's significantly less expensive equipment in Lunar orbit and the distance from Earth and Earth orbit would make an abort simpler.

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=1999+AO10&orb=1 (Requires Java applet to view)

jarin2• 12 years ago

I think you have a warped sense of what "politically correct" means. Just based on how many times I've seen misuse of the term from friends and people on the internet, I give it 90% odds that you're a Republican. :)

JoeAltmaier11• 12 years ago

You'd be wrong.

crapiola• 12 years ago

why?

JoeAltmaier11• 12 years ago

The trillions in metals mined from an asteroid for an investment of billions, all while avoiding ecological disruption.

ColinWright3• 12 years ago

It can be done by robot, it several new abilities, it acts as a staging post for deep space missions, it lets NASA examine an asteroid close up and repeatedly, and it can be mined, again demonstrating abilities needed for deep space missions and for long-term possibilities for resource acquisition and management.

Also, why not?

ddt• 12 years ago

I think the second reason you listed to be much more compelling than the first. It could be argued that the space race was about ensuring that the US had missile superiority over the USSR, but I'd wager a significant number of the aeronautical engineers and astronauts involved were much more interested in going to the moon because it was there.

BrandonMarc2• 12 years ago

... and heck, it gives us a reason to go back to the Moon ... or at least, send more probes, etc, there, which themselves might help give more reason to go back to the Moon.

kumbasha• 12 years ago

This is Step A, where Step Z is one of "save the planet from a world-killing asteroid" or "everyone gets a solid gold toilet" (or "a few people get solid gold toilets larger than the existing moon")

weavie• 12 years ago

The earth doesn't have an unlimited supply of resources. Asteroids are literally loaded with minerals. At some point we are going to deplete the earth and will have to start looking to the skies to get what we need.

gd1• 12 years ago

What are you on about? Limitless energy is rained down on us by the sun, and matter itself is conserved at the elemental level (barring nuclear processes, which are minimal on our planet). What do you suppose we are running out of?

dredmorbius• 12 years ago

The Earth has far more minerals than the asteroid belt combined (its total mass is ~4% that of the Moon[1]). They're just buried under a lot of less interesting minerals. And there's some heat and pressure involved.

I'm not convinced that asteroid mining would be more productive than, say, tapping into rift zones, but it's an interesting problem. Might be useful to solve.

________________________________

Notes:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt#Characteristics http://iau-comm4.jpl.nasa.gov/EPM2004.pdf

jarin2• 12 years ago

Aside from the benefits other people have mentioned, it also gives us a much better understanding of how to deflect asteroids that might impact Earth.

It's a very high "bang for the buck" mission.

hornetblack• 12 years ago

They also worked with the guys at Kerbal Space Program to add an Asteroid retrieval mission to KSP.[1]

[1] http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/content/274

danielweber9• 12 years ago

Such work could help develop ways to use asteroid material for construction or spaceship fuels, making the captured asteroid a stepping stone for human missions to larger asteroids and eventually to Mars.

This has nothing to do with Mars. NASA's current political climate is to say that Mars is their goal and everything is a stepping stone towards it, but this isn't providing any of the key technologies we need for a manned Mars mission (heavy lift, artificial G, Mars landing craft).

EDIT: Not that this is without value. But sell it on its own merits. Saying "we need to mine asteroids to go to Mars" is making it harder to go to Mars.

Zikes3• 12 years ago

They're not saying that we need to mine asteroids to go to Mars, more like the experiences and new technologies involved will add a great deal of value to all future missions, including any potential missions to Mars.

danielweber9• 12 years ago

The things being done to capture an asteroid into lunar orbit are almost completely unrelated to what is needed for a manned Mars mission.

leorocky• 12 years ago

I thought artificial gravity was science fiction. Is that seriously being studied? I'm guessing they just are going to spin some kind of space capsule ala Space Odyssey 2001? What else would they be doing? Not generating any kind of artificial gravitational waves with a magical flux capacitor.

danielweber9• 12 years ago

Yes, spin the craft. NASA's policy has been to never[1] do it, and instead say "but we've been studying microgravity for decades!"

We need experience in maneuvering and setting up a spinning craft and also playing through its failure modes.

[1] They did it exactly once, from my memory, but I forget the details.

Crito5• 12 years ago

Spinning the craft is the easiest way. Spinning the craft around another craft that is tethered to it is better, though more difficult. Basically the tether gets you a longer axis, which makes it more comfortable for humans.

There has been some experimentation with this, such as during Gemini 11 when they did it very slowly with an Agena, but there needs to be more work with it.

keenerd4• 12 years ago

this isn't providing any of the key technologies we need for a manned Mars mission

It would give a really good reason to dust off NERVA, the engine tech Nasa planned to use for a Mars mission in the '70s. Safe, too. NERVA for pushing asteroids around would keep the prototype engines far away from both astronauts and Earth.

danielweber9• 12 years ago

Nuclear rockets would be awesome. They aren't required for a Mars mission, and if we keep on talking about how much they would help, pretty soon they would implicitly end up on the "Required To Get To Mars" list. Then, any problems that nuclear rockets run into (say political opposition, reasonable or not) derails a Mars mission.

k-mcgrady• 12 years ago

First off I have to admit I know practically nothing about this but wouldn't there be some very serious risks to doing this (Edit: If it's only 7m across I'm guessing it wouldn burn up in the Earth's atmosphere so probably poses limit risk to us in the form of an impact)? If there are it raises some serious questions about how humanity decides whether or not to allow NASA or any other space agency to go ahead with such a plan.

okasaki• 12 years ago

The burn would probably (deliberately) be done in such a way that the asteroid's trajectory would never intersect the earth just in case it failed.

Once it's in orbit around the moon it's not going anywhere.

danielweber9• 12 years ago

Things in lunar orbit do degrade and crash into the moon. NASA has put a lot of stuff into lunar orbit over the years and they all eventually crashed. There's essentially no atmosphere, but the Moon is not a perfect sphere and there are mascons that perturb orbits.

It's a question of how high it is, too.

NB: I didn't know this until I asked /r/space about it several years ago.

BrandonMarc2• 12 years ago

I have to say, towing giant space-rocks around and getting them to follow a planned trajectory also sounds like a damn impressive weapon, if someone wants to use it that way.

I'm not saying it's not worth doing; I'm just saying when humans see ___ can be done, enough of them get the idea of weaponizing ___ and we should keep that in mind.

Perhaps we should simultaneously consider what defenses could be put in place ... this has the benefit of being useful planetary defense against "natural" earth-impacting rocks, too.

user080• 12 years ago

Personally I would like to attain some of the gas giants athmosphere( Hydrogen ).

danielweber9• 12 years ago

ITYM Helium-3.

mturmon• 12 years ago

This is an old article (January 2013) and is very interesting, but substantially out of date regarding a story that has developed a lot. The concept, as indicated in the article, was developed by a KISS (Keck Institute) study group, which is a fancy way of saying about 30 scientists/technologists who gathered in a room at Caltech to think up some new mission concepts.

The concept caught some tailwind -- from the manned side of NASA -- and HQ started talking about it as a possible mission concept that would be a step on the manned roadmap. Such fast uptake of a mission concept is incredibly rare.

Then the larger asteroid science community took interest, and was somewhat disgruntled because the concept had not been vetted by the community at large. Controversy ensued throughout 2013 -- partly centered on selection of an asteroid -- here is a good summary: http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2013/07/nasa-warned-go-slow...

The concept is now called the "asteroid initiative" and I think it is also associated with enhancing NEO detection. The web site is here: http://www.nasa.gov/asteroidforum/#.U151pF7fPRo

NASA mulls plan to drag asteroid into Moon's orbit

Related Stories