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Asteroid Manipulation: Capture; Re-Use As Space Platform, etc.

Schwadevivre

Schwadevivre

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Via IBTimes (warning autoplay ad and mouseover ad)
NASA is accepting proposals for its upcoming Asteroid Redirect Mission. The new initiative will attempt to capture and redirect an asteroid to an orbit around the moon, and the space agency is offering $6 million in total awards and will accept up to 25 proposals for new technology concepts.

According to NASA, the Asteroid Redirect Mission will pave the way for the manned mission to Mars in the 2030s, the challenge set forth by President Barack Obama in 2010. As part of the mission, after NASA sends a near-Earth Object (NEO) to a safe orbit, the space agency will send astronauts to explore and collect samples of the asteroid, to occur in the 2020s.

(emphasis mine)
Click to expand...

Personally I think this is NASA's latest attempt to troll conspiracy theorists
 
It does all sound a bit Blofeld. Capture an asteroid in orbit around the Moon, then threaten to throw it at America unless the United Nations agree to pay ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
 
@graylien , there may be as much sense in your statement as there is in this project.. What a strange proposal.

Does anyone here genuinely see any logical transferable benefit arising from this?

The potential disbenefits are insanely dangerous. Seriously, we would seek to relocate a potential killer, and to have tethered by the significant but unequal gravitational pull of the moon...A moon's moon?

Schwadevivre, what do you personally think of this? Do you consider it to be a genuine substantive intention, with a meaningful outcome?? This will not happen, and we know it.

NASA is either a very strange organisation (and by extension, so are it's masters) or it is happy to be misreported upon. Perhaps in the austere 21st century, versus the heady well-funded fun days of the '60s, this is the best we can expect from them.

We should always apply the cui bono test, not for nickels, but for nations, and for when the stakes are crazy.

Subcontracted claptrap like Mars One. A manned space station (now without safe reusable transport) that give us precisely what, that an unmanned one could do? And now 25 tiny house-priced budgets, to help place an orbiting lump around the moon?

I may sound like a reductionist luddite, but as a 60s space-kid who also remembers the vapid madness of Reagan's Star Wars SDI project, and also the more recent 'current progress' on Project Orion, we must always wonder about the true benefits deriving from manned space technology.

Obama's plans in 2010, for right now:
http://m.space.com/8222-obama-aims-send-astronauts-asteroid-mars.html
 
That NASA is trolling conspiracy theorists sounds more likely than such a plan actually succeeding. Is it too cynical to suspect they're actually after something else? Some information, some genius feat of engineering they hadn't been able to create by themselves? Or they want to know who their competition is? Maybe it's simply a plan to alleviate public concern over an asteroid smacking into the Earth - if news slips out that an asteroid is heading this way, they can say, eh, don't worry, we've got it covered.

Heaven knows, asteroid-smashing-into-earth scenarios frighten me. I could face down the yeti, bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster without a worry (I think) but those asteroid stories give me the existential horrors. No doubt the government would like a solution to placate nervous folks such as myself, even if it's silly. Can't have us panicking in the streets and whatnot.

Logic tells me it's probably a just way to pull in more funding, somehow.
 
Or maybe the asteroid is already on the way and this is a smokescreen to try to quickly find ways of changing it's course. The end is nigh, we're all doomed etc etc

But surely we know how to deal with this anyway? You just send up Bruce Willis with a drill and a nuclear bomb. I mean, talk about reinventing the wheel.
 
Careful not to confuse 'Armageddon' with 'Deep Impact'....Seas will Rise, Cities will Fall, Hope will Survive, and in Space no-one can hear you drilling a rock band...(cue Bruce Willis and Elijah Wood, holding hands as they walk towards a new sunrise). The world is saved...at least until the next Hollywood curiously-coincidental production conjunction ('Hey mom, are they trying to tell us someting?')
 
Firstly the asteroid they're aiming for seems to be tens of tonnes, on the evidence of the animation they're looking at something like a 4m sphere, say 30 cubic meters. According to Brittanica asteroids are estimated between 2 and 3.5 gm/cc - which would put the mass in the range of 60 - 90 tonnes. For comparison, the recent Chelyabinsk meteor over Russia was 12 - 13 thousand tonnes (Source Nature)

Benefits, hmm
Probably the automated docking of a large tug to the surface of the asteroid and the controlled approach to orbit of a large mass (the manned portion only occurs near earth to recover a boulder). The accurate determination of the make up of an asteroid and so offering options regarding mitigation of serious impacts. There might be some hope of finding minerals especially iron.
 
I wish to volunteer for this mission! I am prepared to crash the shuttle into the Asteroid.
 
I suspect the real reason behind it is not primarily to redirect an asteroid that threatens Earth, but rather to see if it is possible to mine an asteroid - and to do it completely with robots.
This exercise will tell them if it is possible and whether it will be economically viable.
 
Mythopoeika said:
I suspect the real reason behind it is not primarily to redirect an asteroid that threatens Earth, but rather to see if it is possible to mine an asteroid - and to do it completely with robots.
This exercise will tell them if it is possible and whether it will be economically viable.
Click to expand...
It's the first step on the long road to the Jupiter Mining Corporation's Red Dwarf! :)
 
NASA wants to use 3D printers to turn asteroids into spaceships - Send them back near Earth

The objective of this study is for Made In Space (MIS) to establish the concept feasibility of using the age-old technique of analog computers and mechanisms to convert entire asteroids into enormous autonomous mechanical spacecraft. Project RAMA, Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata, has been designed to leverage the advancing trends of additive manufacturing (AM) and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) to enable asteroid rendezvous missions in which a set of technically simple robotic processes convert asteroid elements into very basic versions of spacecraft subsystems (GNC, Propulsion, Avionics).

LEARN MORE ABOUT MADE IN SPACE http://www.madeinspace.us/

https://futuristech.info/posts/nasa...ids-into-spaceships-send-them-back-near-earth
 
A nice little nod to A.C.Clarke here: Project RAMA, Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata...
 
Too much chance of something going wrong?

Forget deflecting asteroids from hitting Earth—some engineers are drawing up a strategy to steer asteroids toward us, so our atmosphere can act as a giant catching mitt for resource-rich space rocks.

might sound like a crazy idea is actually quite business savvy, according to Minghu Tan, a Ph.D. student at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom who co-authored the new study. That’s because such near-Earth asteroids can host supplies, such as water and precious metals, that could support future human missions to space. But other scientists are skeptical that the concept will ever get off the ground.

The study involves aerobraking, or using the drag created by Earth’s atmosphere to slow down the path of an incoming object. Aerobraking isn’t new—every incoming spacecraft to Earth uses it to slow itself down before landing, and probes to other planets, such as the European Space Agency’s Venus Express and ExoMars missions, have also used the technique.

In the new paper, Tan and colleagues propose using aerobraking to slow small asteroids enough that they don’t just shoot straight past Earth, but stay in orbit, where they could be mined for platinum or water. Those resources could then be taken to space stations to supply future missions or operations. Water, they write, could even be split into hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. All it would take is a precisely calculated push from an unmanned spacecraft, they report this month in Acta Astronautica. ...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018...ly_2018-08-29&et_rid=394299689&et_cid=2336099
 
ramonmercado said:
Too much chance of something going wrong?

Forget deflecting asteroids from hitting Earth—some engineers are drawing up a strategy to steer asteroids toward us, so our atmosphere can act as a giant catching mitt for resource-rich space rocks.

might sound like a crazy idea is actually quite business savvy, according to Minghu Tan, a Ph.D. student at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom who co-authored the new study. That’s because such near-Earth asteroids can host supplies, such as water and precious metals, that could support future human missions to space. But other scientists are skeptical that the concept will ever get off the ground.

The study involves aerobraking, or using the drag created by Earth’s atmosphere to slow down the path of an incoming object. Aerobraking isn’t new—every incoming spacecraft to Earth uses it to slow itself down before landing, and probes to other planets, such as the European Space Agency’s Venus Express and ExoMars missions, have also used the technique.

In the new paper, Tan and colleagues propose using aerobraking to slow small asteroids enough that they don’t just shoot straight past Earth, but stay in orbit, where they could be mined for platinum or water. Those resources could then be taken to space stations to supply future missions or operations. Water, they write, could even be split into hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. All it would take is a precisely calculated push from an unmanned spacecraft, they report this month in Acta Astronautica. ...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018...ly_2018-08-29&et_rid=394299689&et_cid=2336099
Click to expand...
Where should we bring them down? The Middle East? North Korea?
 
ramonmercado said:
Too much chance of something going wrong?

Forget deflecting asteroids from hitting Earth—some engineers are drawing up a strategy to steer asteroids toward us, so our atmosphere can act as a giant catching mitt for resource-rich space rocks.

might sound like a crazy idea is actually quite business savvy, according to Minghu Tan, a Ph.D. student at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom who co-authored the new study. That’s because such near-Earth asteroids can host supplies, such as water and precious metals, that could support future human missions to space. But other scientists are skeptical that the concept will ever get off the ground.

The study involves aerobraking, or using the drag created by Earth’s atmosphere to slow down the path of an incoming object. Aerobraking isn’t new—every incoming spacecraft to Earth uses it to slow itself down before landing, and probes to other planets, such as the European Space Agency’s Venus Express and ExoMars missions, have also used the technique.

In the new paper, Tan and colleagues propose using aerobraking to slow small asteroids enough that they don’t just shoot straight past Earth, but stay in orbit, where they could be mined for platinum or water. Those resources could then be taken to space stations to supply future missions or operations. Water, they write, could even be split into hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. All it would take is a precisely calculated push from an unmanned spacecraft, they report this month in Acta Astronautica. ...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018...ly_2018-08-29&et_rid=394299689&et_cid=2336099
Click to expand...
Or, why not use asteroid as carriers for trips to (say) Mars. Hitch a ride, give it a nudge, sit tight and hop off at the end.
 
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