Looks kind of familiar...
Posted on 07/25/2011 4:26:50 PM PDT by Do Not Make Fun Of His Ears
With the space shuttle now history, Nasa's next great mission is so audacious, the agency's best minds are wrestling with how to pull it off.
They have presidential orders to to send astronauts to an asteroid in less than 15 years.
The challenges are innumerable, but many Nasa brains are thrilled to have such an improbable assignment - and believe civilisation may even depend on it.
An asteroid is a giant space rock that orbits the sun, like Earth. And someday one might threaten the planet.
But sending people to one won't be easy. You can't land on an asteroid because you'd bounce off - it has virtually no gravity. Astronauts couldn't even walk on it because they'd float away.
Reaching it might require a Nasa spacecraft to harpoon it.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
We need a cheap launcher to put men on to the space station rather than rely on the old Soviets technology of Russia to do it. Maybe the Russians won after all.
It won't be easy because who can plot such a mission in one week's time which seems to be scientists' warning time frame on the "near misses" they've boasted about in the past 5 years.
Since they worship an asteroid in Mecca, a visit to an orbiting asteroid would be banishment to the anti-Mecca. Is not halal for a muslim to make this voyage.
Or we can even do both by going to Phobos/Deimos, the asteroid sized moons of Mars. Set up a base there for future landing on the surface.
Actually, I support this kind of mission, because processing asteroids into useful space materials is a necessary next step in colonization. And technically we already have landed a probe on an asteroid, around 1999/2000.
Looks kind of familiar...
How and with what? The boy king cancelled our heavy lifts, we’re going to have to pay, and handsomely at that, for another country to lift us into space. I doubt that they want to do something so fundamentally insane as to try to navigate a space body that has no gravity.
Some idiot has been watching too many movies.
Snark Trek.
No, it’s not. Ignore the idiot in the Administrator’s office.
At least Goldin tried to do some missions, in amongst his politicking.
Unfortunately, soft landing on Mars is impossible with rockets that we have (or know about.) Mars is worse than the Moon. The reason is that it has atmosphere. The atmosphere is too thin for a winged lander (Shuttle) or a parachute, but too dense for a vertical rocket-assisted landing.
The latter is not obvious, but it had been discussed many times on science and astronautics blogs. The rocket engine is open at the nozzle end. The incoming atmosphere, at many a Mach number, will create resonances within the chamber of the engine. Those resonances can completely shut the engine down, or interfere with it enough for you to drop like a stone (doesn't take much - failure of your only braking engine at 10 miles above Mars is not recoverable.)
Ideally, you land on Mars on gravity engines. Unfortunately, the blueprints of those are locked in a safe at Area 51 :-)
Landing on asteroids is not a landing at all, it's more like matching speeds and then drifting close enough to fire a harpoon and pull the ship closer. To start in the opposite direction you simply cut the rope and do whatever you want - the asteroid is not going to interfere and you don't need to use fuel to escape its gravity (it's negligible.) On the other hand, asteroids are pretty far away, and you may need some considerable fuel reserves to just keep the ship running for a couple of years that it takes to get there and back.
All in all, I don't see a good reason to send humans anywhere beyond the Moon. Planets, starting with Mars, are just too far away and humans are too short-lived and human engines are too weak. If you want, make a rocket with nuclear engines, and send robots to other planets. They will get there faster, and they don't need to return. Even today we have pretty decent mechanisms. They aren't proper thinking robots yet, but that is not even required, as long as the probe reports its findings every day and listens for instructions. There is no hurry, the probe can sit there, charge batteries or whatever it is doing in idle time, and wait until the controllers tell it what needs to be done.
There is an even better reason to send probes instead of humans. We need to test many asteroids, not just one. We need to know statistics about their composition. Testing of one piece of stone is pointless. Machines will do the testing better than humans; humans, after all, only can insert the sample into the machine - they can't use their eyes or other senses to test for chemicals. So why to send a valuable biological sample handling device (a human) when you can send an automated drill?
Ultimately, access to the space depends on good, clean, affordable engines. What we have now is neither. Every launch costs a small kingdom, and the mass that is delivered into orbit is fairly small. We have no engines to efficiently go beyond the LEO. It would be most important to develop those; nuclear propulsion is one possibility, but there are other. Most importantly, those engines should use reactive mass that can be found outside of Earth; water is one such option. We wouldn't want to buy a car that is pre-fueled at the factory and can't be refueled by the owner; so why do we accept that in rockets?
Is Sheila Jackson Lee running NASA now?
You are wrong, because we routinely have more than 1,000 small asteroids ranging in size from rocks a few meters to tens or hundreds of meters in diameter passing through the inner Solar System and making near approaches to the Earth, occasionally between the Earth and the Moon, less than 240,000 miles distance. While it is true most of the well known and larger asteroids are to be found in the asteroid belt in a Solar orbit between Mars and Jupiter, There a plenty of the smaller asteroids sharing orbits similar to the Earth's own orbit. Eros will return to within 17 million miles of the Earth on its next close approach. See: NASA, Near Earth Object Program, Orbital Diagrams http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/orbits/
There are also a multitude of reasons why manned missions to the asteroids are highly desirable. Among those reasons is far greater accessibility to resources and return transport of manufactured products, scientific research into the origins of the Solar System and the Earth, and astronomical observation platforms. The larger asteroids in the Solar System may be exploited to harbor human communities by offering more habitable land space within the interior of the asteroid than there is total land surface on the Earth, using Ceres and Vesta as examples.
The most difficult and expensive part of space travel is the cost in energy, material, and labor to exit a planet's gravity well and safe return into the gravity well and a planetary atmosphere. When you avoid entering and exiting these gravity wells and planetary atmospheres, you very dramatically lower the demands and requirements for fuel, energy, and labor.
Although having some operations on the Moon is desirable and perhaps necessary to a Solar community, there needs to be a near Earth orbit station and another station at one of the Earth's Lagrangian points to be used as transit points for travel between the Earth, Moon, Mars, and rest of the Solar System. When traveling between earth and Mars, it would be most advantageous to first establish a transit station on one or both of the Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos. Atmospheric shuttles would operate between the surface of Mars and the Martian noons, while the Earth to Mars spacecraft would shuttle passengers between a space station in low Earth orbit or the Lagrangian point to the transit station in low Mars orbit or on Phobos or Deimos.
The asteroids and comets in interplanetary space contain vast stores of metals, water, Solar energy, and other sources of energy. It is too costly to transport the raw materials into and out of planetary gravity wells. It is much more feasible to manufacture the raw material into finished goods for transport into the gravity wells, just as it is far more feasible than transporting finished goods out of a gravity well to destinations in space.
Asteroids also offer much more effective shielding against most harmful Solar and interstellar radiation outside the protection of the Earth's Van Allen Belts. Using an asteroid positioned in a Lagrangian point is a very useful means of protecting a manned space station against radiation and micrometeorites.
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The ultimate purpose is to burrow inside of the "big rock in space" and live in it like a space age caveman while you pursue your other activities in the space environment. The "big rock" furnishes shielding and shelter against radiation, micrometeorites, and collision mishaps. It can also provide a much lower cost material for habitable space where alternatives for a gravity environment can be established for the station crew.
We have been there, we know how to get back there and we have found enough water to potentially stay there to establish a base of operations. We can even play golf on the Moon which makes it worth the trip regardless
At issue here is to distract the US Space effort with some expensive and worthless objective like asteroid chasing while the Chinese catch up the US in space technology and develop a Chinese space program so they can make their trip to the Moon to establish a territorial presence and territorial claims.
The plans for U.S. human space exploration have been trashed with no reasonable replacement planed. It's over for us, for now. We have higher Marxist priorities.
Then you need to check again, because asteroids pass within the Moon and Earth orbit on occasion. 2005 YU55 is due to pass within the Moon's orbit at a distance of 201,700 miles (325,000 kilometers) about 8 November 2011. It is about the size of an aircraft carrier. See:
Near Earth Object Program, Orbital Diagrams http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/orbits/
A permanent station on the Moon will ultimately require a low Earth orbit transit station. The ISS (International Space Station) represents an experimental first step towards such a transit station in low Earth orbit. Unfortunately, however, the low Earth orbit space station is too far into the Earth's gravity well for certain types of activities required for permanent operations on the Moon.
Another space station is needed at Earth's Lagrangian point to take advantage of using railguns and similar transportation systems for the transport of certain cargoes and passengers to and from the Moon. A space station at the Lagrangian point will be outside the Earth's gravity well and outside the Earth's protective Van Allen belts. Using an asteroid for the space station at the Lagrangian point would be an ideal solution for a transit station with shielding from radiation and micrometeorites. It would also have the benefit of serving as an ideal transit station for all travel to destinations in the outer and inner Solar System. It would also serve as an outstanding launch site for unmanned missions, using resources delivered from the Moon transported by rail gun.
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