Asteroid takeout — a one-billionaire mission to bring a 500-ton asteroid to Earth by 2025
April 24, 2012 | Source: Ars Technica
Illustration of an asteroid retrieval spacecraft in the process of capturing a 7-m, 500-ton asteroid (credit: Rick Sternbach/KISS)
Cal Tech’s Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) commissioned a study of the feasibility of bringing an asteroid to the International Space Station beginning in September 2011 and issued its report earlier this month.
The targeted asteroid would weight about 500 metric tons and measure roughly 7 meters across.
A robotic asteroid retrieval mission would contribute toward an invaluable advance in human spaceflight, a leap forward in several areas in which humankind must make progress in order to advance into the solar system.
Ref.: Keck Institute for Space Studies, Asteroid Retrieval Feasibility Study, 2012 [PDF] (open access)
Also see: Asteroid mining company Planetary Resources live webcast
Comments (3)
by Gorden Russell
Go read the Wikipaedia article on Lagrangian points. L-5 would be the best place to park the asteroid. You could work on it to your heart’s content and it would never drift away.
by DeBee Corley
Innovative to me would be to collect 100,000 500 ton asteroids. A synchronous moon at 18000 miles. Resources…
by Marcos Marin
isn’t KISS short for “keep it simple stupid”? =)
Doesn’t sound like a big one, but for those it would be safer to just hit it on the moon and wait for a mission to study it there.