[meteorite-list] NASA Wants $100 Million To Catch An Asteroid

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx_03_28_2013_p0-564163.xml

NASA Wants $100 Million To Catch An Asteroid
By Frank Morring, Jr. 
Aviation Week & Space Technology
March 28, 2013 

NASA's fiscal 2014 budget request will include $100 million for a new 
mission to find a small asteroid, capture it with a robotic spacecraft 
and bring it into range of human explorers somewhere in the vicinity of 
the Moon.

Suggested last year by the Keck Institute for Space Studies at the California 
Institute of Technology, the idea has attracted favor at NASA and the White 
House Office of Science and Technology Policy. President Obama's goal of 
sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025 can't be done with 
foreseeable civil-space spending, the thinking goes. But by moving an 
asteroid to cislunar space — a high lunar orbit or the second Earth-Moon 
Lagrangian Point (EML2), above the Moon's far side - it is conceivable that 
technically the deadline could be met.

The Keck study estimated it would cost about $2.65 billion to bring in a 
500,000-kg (1.1 million-lb.) asteroid, using solar-electric propulsion to 
reach it and a deployable capture bag to enfold a carbonaceous asteroid 
measuring 7 meters across. Positioned at EML2, the small space rock would be 
close enough to reach with an Orion crew vehicle launched by a heavy-lift 
Space Launch System, and would give a crew a real objective for scientific 
study.

Members of the Keck team that drafted the proposal briefed it to a National 
Research Council human-spaceflight technical feasibility panel on March 28, 
noting that the mission would not pose a threat to Earth because the asteroid 
would have the density of "a dried mudball," and would come in much more slowly 
than the slightly larger asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 
February.

The hardest part, says Paul Dimotakis of Caltech, would be finding a suitable 
target, since it would be much smaller than the threatening near-Earth objects 
already being sought. One or more targets may already have been spotted 
and dismissed as noise by sky-scanning telescope algorithms, he says, 
and could be pulled out of existing databases with a software rewrite. 
In addition to size, makeup and spin, prospective targets would need to 
be on a heliocentric orbit that will return to Earth's vicinity in the 
2020s, to allow time to develop the mission.

The initial NASA request will be divided among the agency's human exploration, 
science and space technology directorates to begin advancing technology already 
in the works.

That hardware and know-how would also be useful in developing a way to push 
a threatening asteroid off a collision course with Earth if that ever 
becomes necessary, says former Planetary Society chief Louis Friedman, 
another member of the Keck team. And it would be useful to private companies 
that are already developing long-term plans to exploit asteroids with 
robotic mining for water and metals.

"I certainly do see a role," says Chris Lewicki, president and chief engineer of 
Planetary Resources, Inc. Lewicki says a captured asteroid could serve as a "test 
mine" that would "allow human operators to bridge the gap between current robotic 
capability and autonomy" and give expert researchers an opportunity to gain field 
experience.