NASA mulls plan to drag asteroid into moon’s orbit
January 3, 2013
Asteroid (credit: NEAR Project, NLR, JHUAPL, Goddard SVS, NASA/Wikimedia Commons)
NASA is mulling over a plan to build a robotic spacecraft to grab a small asteroid and place it in high lunar orbit, according to researchers with the Keck Institute for Space Studies in California.
The mission would cost about $2.6 billion and could be completed by the 2020s, New Scientist reports.
The Obama administration has said it also wants to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid. One proposed target, chosen because of its scientific value and favourable launch windows for a rendezvous, is a space rock called 1999 AO10.
The mission would take about half a year, exposing astronauts to long-term radiation beyond Earth’s protective magnetic field and taking them beyond the reach of any possible rescue.
Robotically bringing an asteroid to the moon instead would be a more attractive first step, the Keck researchers conclude, because an object orbiting the moon would be in easier reach of robotic probes and maybe even humans.
Comments (21)
by craigtown61
This is an aweseem first step as later we can drag the large asteroid Ceres around mars and give it a sizeable enough moon to start to reliquify the core of Mars through gravitational friction.
by Samantha Atkins
Shepherding near earth asteroids to orbits or locations where they may be more efficiently exploited is a hugely important essential stepping stone to space presence and industry. Asteroids are rich in many structural metals, rare earths, precious metals and in volatiles for oxygen production, fuel and other uses. Many asteroids are much richer sources of various materials than are commonly considered minable on earth. The richest nickel vein on earth is from a metallic meteor impact long ago. Asteroid based material exploitation not only can easily pay its way many times over but frees us from having to lift all space building materials up a steep gravity well.
Where to move them to includes GEO and the LaGrange points and crashing them into the moon. Bring them to these locations enables the use of teleoperated equipment as our autonomous space based robotics are not yet up to the task. And of course it leaves refined products at or near the point where they are most useful for further developing near earth space.
by craigtown61
I think it wa Zubrin who calculates that our nearest earth asteriods are worth at least $20 Trillion dollars each in metals.
by Ilya
WTH?
There are no stable orbits around the Moon. All Moon satellites had to adjust their orbits periodically, and crashed after they ran out of fuel — either deliberately like recent GRAIL satellites, or uncontrollably. If this scheme ever gets carried out, end result will be another Moon crater.
by egore
I would think it would be more cost efficient to crash asteroids in to the Moon and mine them there. Besides, it would probably get a few aliens mad, who inadvertantly may be using the moon as a base.
by egore
That may seem a little far fetched, but probably no more so than the possibility that there are particles we cannot detect, because they are going faster than the speed of light, and are hard to detect because of this.
by klaatu
Right wing & libertarian sci/fi writers have been writing
about this very thing lately. I forget the guys name (b/c
I wanted to very badly) but I got the book out of the library
& realized the “bad guys” were “fanatical eco-terrorists” etc
who infiltrate projects involving the capture & mining of
near earth asteroids etc. Eco-terrorist is something straight
out of the “left behind” mentality of LaHaye & ppl like him.
All the while neglecting to notice that the party of their choice,
the RAY-publican party, has purged nearly all elected moderates
leaving the inmates of the tea party in control. Which Koch Brother
controls the libertarian party & Cato? Is it the older “Big Brother”
Koch?
by GrahamRounce
“Right wing & libertarian sci/fi writers”
Yeah, you can tell them by their over-use of “we” :)
by Bri
I don’t think we should bring anything that big back. Maybe at best the size of a small car. It’s more for research and proof of principal. I do think we should design it to be fully autonomous and reusable. If we choose the right rocks, we can use the material to build more. It’s a long trek and a waste to be bringing unwanted materials back. I’d quickly set up processing facilities in orbit around Mars and just ship cargo. Almost all of that should be done robotically, remotely. Soft AI and hard AI will excel at these tasks. Should that be owned by a company, a nation, a cartel, or my personal favorite, everyone, is what’s up for grabs right now. So git yer ole tima prospecting gear on, for there is gold up in them thar hills. The principals of capitalism says that who ever gets there first wins.( or in Ayan Rand terms we should step out of the way and let the big boys carve it up for themselves.)
by Jim Mooney
I was just reading here how cybercriminals can now hack almost any code and nations, too. So, a la crashing airliners with low tech box cutters, they wait for us obligingly to bring an asteroid back, then hack the robot to propel it into Los Angeles. As careful as I am after webmastering for years, I recently got my hard drive wiped with a drive-by virus.
by DeBee Corley
How about something constructive. Crash ice asteroids onto Mars. About a billion of ‘em. At $2 billion each, only cost $2 quintillion.
by GrahamRounce
Seems very expensive for what you get. And why lunar orbit?
by Gorden Russell
GrahamRounce, there are spots around the moon, and along the moon’s orbit called “Lagrange Points.” The gravitational fields of Earth and Moon cancel out in these spots and if you park something there, it will be stable and stay there for billions and billions of years.
by GrahamRounce
Yes, I know. How many billions of years of investigation of the asteroid will be required?
by GatorALLin
Today, ~500,000 minor planets are known. Of that number, ~6600 are NEOs; of that number ~1100 are PHOs.”
PHOs – or Potentially Hazardous Objects – are classed as objects that come within 0.05 AU (7.5 million km) of the Earth. PHOs are in orbits that have the potential to make close approaches to the Earth and of a size large enough to cause significant regional damage in the event of an impact.
Further information on the number of NEOs and PHOs will be forthcoming via “Next Generation Surveys such as LSST & Pan-STARRS, along with current on-going surveys, (which) expect to find many more NEOs and PHOs. The next generation surveys includes: Tracking (for better orbit determination). Characterization (taxonomy, minerals, volatiles, etc.). NEO-WISE is expected to find a few hundred NEOs in the next year.”
Based on the NEOs of interest – ones which are potential targets for a sending an expedition to visit – NASA has estimated 39 are accessible “based on a flight system assumptions consistent with a single Ares V-class launch.”
by DougW
Hmmmmm…make even a tiny mistake in putting an asteroid in moon orbit, and you could have yourself a pretty significant disaster here on earth. I would not recommend that we even consider ‘moving’ asteroids toward our planet until we have adequately displayed our ability to move them away very forcefully if necessary….
by Gorden Russell
Don’t worry about it, DougW. I’m sure the first one they bring back will be so small that it wouldn’t make it through the atmosphere if it were mishandled. They’ll be sure to be careful that even that doesn’t happen. Along with nickel-iron there will be rare-earth metals and platinum group metals. You could build a lot of great things up in orbit with all these metals — space stations, space ships, and robots to put all these things together.
And yes, gaoptimize, those visionary billionaires at Planetary Resources could just be the ones to do this.
With a 3-D printer fed by minerals from the asteroid, giant pressure domes could be set up to work in, giant parabolic mirrors can be set up to melt down the nickel-iron, centrifuges can also be built for separation of ores. Anything could be done up there.
by Jim O'Donnell
Absolutely correct. Starts out as innocently as the bringing the gypsy moth to our country for experimentation and then …*WHOOPS* … a pair got away!
by gaoptimize
I’ll bet private initiative beats them to it and does something useful: Puts a nickel-iron asteroid in LEO for mining.
by piman
I think the first part is plausible; but I bet Low-Earth Orbit will never happen, because of fears of an impact.
(At least until the singularity :)
by Gorden Russell
This is what I’ve been talking about all along. Once you’ve brought one back to cis-lunar orbit, you have all the time you want to work on it.