“We’ll peel back those opportunities in Phase A,” Lightfoot added, with the next milestone, an acquisition strategy meeting, coming in July. This is where commercial participants will come into play - the boulder retrieval option garnered lots of interest from private industries, both traditional and non-traditional, he said. Now that the conceptual study and review are complete, ARM enters “Phase A,” the part of NASA’s mission-planning where detailed strategy and costs are laid out. Two other candidates are Itokawa, an S-type (read: stony) asteroid visited by Japan’s Hayabusa mission in 2005, and Bennu, the planned target of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, scheduled to launch in 2016 and reach the asteroid in 2019. Astronomers have studied it extensively with optical, infrared, and radar observations, garnering a good idea of its size, shape, spin, and orbit, says Lindley Johnson, the program executive of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program. The leading candidate is 2008 EV5, a carbonaceous asteroid whose surface may hearken back to the solar system’s infancy. Three potential targets have been identified so far for this mission. “But there’s a scientific benefit to what we’re doing too.” “This is a capability-demonstration mission, developing the capabilities we’ll need to take humans to space and to Mars,” Lightfoot says. When Earth-based telescopes have measured the asteroid’s slight deflection, probably after 215 to 400 days of halo-orbit tugging, the spacecraft will head home again, boulder in tow. The spacecraft will stay on one side of the asteroid so it can exert the slightest of tugs on the asteroid’s path by maintaining a halo orbit, circling around one of the points where the asteroid’s gravitational pull cancels that of the Sun. After retrieving the rock, the slightly more massive spacecraft will attempt to deflect the asteroid’s orbit. Option B will also enable NASA to test a planetary defense technique: the gravity tractor. The plan is for the boulder-retrieving spacecraft to test a planetary defense technique known as the "gravity tractor." By maintaining an orbit to one side of the asteroid, the spacecraft can over time influence the asteroid's trajectory. Boulder capture, possibly with “microspine” technology, will be another useful technique in the toolkit of future missions. The robotic spacecraft will also land softly on an asteroid, a capability that future space missions may need for resupply or refueling. Though slower than conventional chemical propellants, SEP moves massive cargo (such as asteroid boulders) efficiently, with far less propellant required. The technology uses solar panels to produce electricity, which accelerates ions that propel the spacecraft forward. An integrated drill will be used to provide final anchoring of the boulder to the capture mechanism.Īmong the capabilities is solar electric propulsion (SEP, which has already sent the NASA’s Dawn spacecraft to two asteroids). The microspines use thousands of small spines to dig into the boulder and create a strong grip. Microspine grippers on the end of the robotics arms can be used to grasp and secure a boulder. More importantly, NASA associate administrator Robert Lightfoot told reporters in a press conference on March 25 th, Option B will build long-term capabilities for sending humans into space. But it’s also the safer choice, with more time to assess the asteroid during approach, more targets (i.e., boulders) to pick from, and multiple opportunities for the actual pick-up. The selection of so-called “Option B” costs slightly more ($100 million) and brings the mission total, not including the launch vehicle, to $1.25 billion. NASA has been planning an asteroid mission for two years already, but until now preparations have been split between two options: bagging a small asteroid - the whole kit and caboodle - or retrieving a small boulder off a larger asteroid. A preliminary schedule has the spacecraft set for a December 2020 launch, and by mid-decade two astronauts will have their own look-see at the asteroid boulder in lunar orbit. In a step forward for NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), the agency announced today that it’s proceeding with plans to retrieve a boulder up to 4 meters wide from a larger asteroid. NASA has chosen to send a spacecraft to retrieve a boulder from the surface of an asteroid. NASA has made a decision on the design for its Asteroid Redirect Mission, opting to retrieve a boulder from a larger asteroid.
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