NASA touts plan to grab asteroid as 'unprecedented technological feat'

[BlueGin]

NASA says it will begin work on an ambitious mission to capture a near-Earth asteroid and bring it to a stable orbit in the Earth-moon system as part of the agency's overall $17.7 billion agenda for the coming year.

The budget request for fiscal year 2014, unveiled on Wednesday, also aims to get U.S. astronauts back to flying on U.S.-based spaceships by 2017, launch the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope by 2018 and send another rover to Mars by 2020.

The proposed budget is about $50 million less than the amount sought a year ago, but about $1 billion more than the agency's current spending plan. Billions of dollars would be set aside to continue operations on the International Space Station, keep up the work on interplanetary missions, expand the nation's network of Earth-observing satellites and upgrade aerospace technologies. However, the headline-grabber in the budget is the asteroid retrieval mission, which is budgeted for $105 million in spending during the fiscal year beginning in September.


"This mission represents an unprecedented technological feat that will lead to new scientific discoveries and technological capabilities and help protect our home planet," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement accompanying the budget request.

NASA touts plan to grab asteroid as 'unprecedented technological feat' - Cosmic Log

 

[Old Rocks]

I cannot think of a better use for our tax dollars. What we are communticating on right now is a result of the money spent on the early space program.

 

[waltky]

Granny says dey's the Lord's weapons o' destruction like it says in Isa. 13.5...

NASA Explores Technology to Face Asteroid Danger
May 01, 2013 WASHINGTON — Asteroids - those millions of chunks of space rock, large and small, that drift and spin across our solar system - hold promise for space explorers even as they pose a threat to us on Earth.

When NASA Administrator Charles Bolden discussed the U.S. space agency's proposed 2014 budget with lawmakers in late April, he highlighted a new mission - a plan to capture an asteroid in deep space and bring it to the vicinity of the moon, where astronauts could later explore it. "We are developing a process or technology that will come forward in the asteroid retrieval mission that will demonstrate that humans can, in fact, alter the path of an asteroid that's headed toward Earth," he said. A key part of the planned mission, Bolden underscored, is to show that an asteroid's path can be diverted.

Robotics and advanced SEP technologies like this artist's concept of an SEP-based spacecraft could one day find, rendezvous with, capture and relocate an asteroid to a stable point in the lunar vicinity.

Asteroid Threats

Earlier this year, a small meteor unexpectedly exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, and produced a shockwave that shattered thousands of windows and injured more than 1,000 people. The same day, a well-tracked, 45-meter-wide asteroid called 2012 DA14 whizzed safely past Earth, closer than our geosynchronous satellites. It was a record close approach for something that size. Experts say asteroids larger than 100 meters across strike the Earth's surface, on average, about once every 10,000 years, and there are no records of an asteroid killing anyone in modern history.

John Holdren, the U.S. president's assistant for science and technology, discussed asteroid threats at a hearing on Capitol Hill in March. He told lawmakers that given the rarity of large asteroid impacts, the potential loss of human life from such an event works out to fewer than 100 people per year, which he compared to 5 million deaths each year from tobacco. "It doesn't look like a very big threat," Holdren said. "But, of course, that is not really a meaningful way to present a risk of this character, where you're talking about a low probability of a very big disaster, and in those sorts of situations, we tend to invest in insurance to reduce the likelihood of a disaster we would regard as intolerable."

Insurance, of course, was not an option for dinosaurs, which are believed to have been killed off 65 million years ago after a 10-kilometer-wide asteroid crashed into the Earth. Holdren says an asteroid even a fraction of that size could undo life as we know it. "A one-kilometer asteroid would be carrying energy in the range of tens of millions of megatons. That is as much or more energy as was in the combined arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War," he said. "An asteroid of that size, a kilometer or bigger, could plausibly end civilization."

Tracking Asteroids

 

[there4eyeM]

Cute, but don't screw the pooch!