NASA's pipe dream...capture an asteroid with a trash bag

"Asteroid in a Bag: NASA’s Long, Strange Trip"

by

Jeffrey Kluger

April 9th 2013

Time

Want an example of brilliant engineering, nimble execution and the ability to do great—even inspiring—things? Look to NASA. At any moment, a fleet of spacecraft—every one of them bearing the NASA logo and the stars and stripes—are ranging throughout the solar system, approaching, orbiting or roving across the surface of other worlds.

Want an example of aimlessness, misdirection and borderline preposterousness, abetted by a Congress and a White House that seem to have no flipping idea what they’re doing? You can look to NASA for that too. It all depends on whether you’re talking about the manned or unmanned space programs.

I won’t give away which is the joker in this two-card deck, but here are a few recent headlines produced by both sides of America’s space agency coin: “Curiosity Rover Lands Safely on Mars,” “Voyager Crossing Superhighway to Solar System Exit,” “NASA Plans to Put Asteroid in Giant Baggie, Drag it to Moon and Send Astronauts to Explore It—in 2021. Maybe.” OK, I made that last one up—but only the headline. The part about the asteroid and the Baggie and the astronauts? That’s the real deal. And that’s a big problem.

The unlikely plan, announced over the weekend by Fla. Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson and said to be included in a $100 million appropriation in President Obama’s 2014 budget, is for an unmanned spaecraft to be launched by 2017 to capture a 25-ft., 500-ton asteroid with, yes, a giant drawstring bag, according to one NASA scientist. The rock would then be towed back to the vicinity of the moon where it would be safely parked in space. In 2021, astronauts would travel out to the asteroid in a brand new Apollo-like spacecraft lofted by a brand-new heavy-lift rocket. Once there, they would land, prospect for metals and learn more about both living off the cosmic land and deflecting rogue asteroids that might threaten Earth.

Should we be excited? Is this really going to happen? One standard I like to use in cases like this is the Count the Conditionals rule. The more times contingent words like would, could or should are used in any space-related press release, the less likely it is that anything being described will actually happen. Nelson’s office issued a seven-conditional release (“…a new monster rocket would travel to the asteroid where there could be mining activity…”) out of a total of just 483 words. So that’s not good.

More troubling is that the new rocket, known prosaically as the Space Launch System (SLS), has not been built and is not targeted for completion until 2017. The new spacecraft—called Orion—may have its first unmanned flight in 2014. In theory, that would make the baggie mission a real possibility. In practice is almost surely won’t.

For one thing, Orion and a new heavylift booster have been in some phase of development since early 2004, ever since former Pres. Bush called for a return-to-the moon initiative, and the target date for flying them keeps receding. For historical comparison, an equal nine-year span—from 1960 to 1969—was all it took NASA to invent, build and fly six manned Mercury spacecraft, 10 manned Geminis and 5 of the 11 manned Apollos, not to mention the massive Saturn V rocket that would be awfully nifty to have around now, since we wouldn’t need the SLS.

The difference between those nine years and the last nine years is clarity of goal. Even people who were opposed to the original space race—and there were plenty who saw it as a waste of money in an era of war, inflation and urban decay—had to acknowledge that it was crisply defined. President Kennedy announced a target (the moon), a deadline (1970) and a mission (landing a man there and returning him safely to Earth). It’s awfully hard to get those kinds of marching orders wrong.

The current manned program, on the other hand, has been more of a country ramble. The shuttles—which never lived up to their safe, reliable and easily reusable billing—pulled most of the air and money out of the room for more than 30 years. The space station, first proposed by Ronald Reagan in 1984, with an announced completion date of 1989 and a price tag of $9 billion, instead was not fully built until 2011 and cost a tidy $100 billion. The return-to-the-moon initiative lasted just six years, dying the familiar death of the new Administration, when it was scrapped by Pres. Obama in 2010. In its place, Obama proposed a vaguely defined plan to go somewhere—perhaps the moon, perhaps Mars, perhaps an asteroid, perhaps a gravity-neutral Lagrange point—all of which would be accomplished with an equally vaguely defined spacecraft.

The hardware piece of that scenario at least has come into sharper focus, thanks to Congressional lobbying efforts in support of Orion and the SLS, led in part by Nelson and former Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. Obama, whose luke-warmth toward space has been evident since his 2008 campaign, has backed these plans, and is likely to continue to—at least as long as Florida remains a presidential swing state and any long-term hopes the Democratic party has of turning bright red Texas at least light blue hinge on keeping Houston happy.

But none of this has led to any real clarification of the mission. The asteroid-towing idea is only the latest of many proposals, and is easily the least probable and most Rube Goldbergian of them all. A senior administration official could muster only an anodyne statement in support of it today:

    NASA is in the planning stages of an innovative mission to accomplish the President’s challenge of sending humans to visit an asteroid by 2025 in a more cost-effective and potentially quicker time frame than under other scenarios. This mission would combine the best of NASA’s asteroid identification, technology development, and human exploration efforts to capture and redirect a small asteroid to just beyond the moon to set up a human mission using existing resources and equipment, including the heavy-lift rocket and deep-space capsule that have been under development for several years.

But the other questions that leaves unanswered are legion. First, the $100 million is only seed money for a program that would cost more than $2.5 billion for the asteroid capture portion alone, not to mention untold billions more for the manned part. What’s more, snagging an asteroid may sound easy, but…oh wait, it doesn’t sound easy at all, and that’s because it’s not.  You’ve got to find a rock of the right size at the right distance, invent your Baggie or your lasso or whatever you’re going to use, figure out how to chug-chug the thing back to the vicinity of the moon in a trip that would take years, and then station it in a stable spot. Oh, and it would help if the asteroid you grab actually had any of the precious metals like platinum or gold and prosaic ones like iron and zinc that you’d be interested in mining in the first place. So maybe there are still a few details that need to be worked out.

Perhaps most troubling of all is a certain cosmic ennui behind the plan. Nelson’s release cited a feasibility study that supports the capture mission, but for a singularly upside down reason. “[B]ringing a 500-ton asteroid closer to Earth would give astronauts a ‘unique, meaningful and affordable’ destination for the next decade,” the press statement says.

The moon’s not unique? Mars isn’t meaningful? The moons of Mars—which offer an even more attractive target because you could land and take off without the massive engine needed to overcome planetary gravity—wouldn’t be a little bit of both? Have we really gotten to the point that after just six lunar landings more than 40 years ago we’re so bored with the familiar cosmos that we’ve got to go inventing destinations, like the artificial archipelagos off the coast of Dubai in the shape of a palm tree and the world’s continents? And as for the “affordable” piece of Nelson’s argument? If you’re going to need to build Orion and the SLS for any of the proposed missions, how does it cut costs to include an asteroid-dragging phase that, at the moment at least, doesn’t pass the eye-roll test?

Look, the fact is, NASA is still home to some of the biggest and most creative brains in the world. And if the kinds of jobs its machines are doing—exploring Mars, approaching Pluto, orbiting Mercury, nearing the very limits of the solar system itself—don’t take your breath away, you might not have any breath in you to begin with. But today’s manned program is a different thing. Press releases are not the same as coherent plans, and “would” or “could” have never been the same as “will” and “can.” NASA used to know that. It needs, alas, to learn it again.

Vesta's huge mountain

"New images of protoplanet Vesta reveal mountain bigger than Everest"

Planetary scientists are getting an initial look at the protoplanet Vesta via NASA's Dawn mission, revealing a surprising range of features – including long parallel troughs around the equator.

by

Pete Spotts

October 12th, 2011

The Christian Science Monitor

The protoplanet Vesta, once a fuzzball in telescopic images, is revealing a surprising range of features – from a mountain with a rise three times higher than Mt. Everest's to a puzzling band of deep, wide, and long troughs gouged into Vesta's surface.

These are among the highlights from an initial look planetary scientists are getting at Vesta via NASA's Dawn mission. The researchers described their observations on Wednesday at a meeting of the Geological Society of America in Minneapolis.

Launched Sept. 27, 2007, Dawn arrived at Vesta last July and is lingering for a year's worth of observations before moving on to another, equally intriguing object, Ceres.

Both Vesta and Ceres orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter among an assemblage of construction rubble known as main-belt asteroids – leftovers from the early, heady days of planet formation in some 4.5 billion years ago.

But Vesta and Ceres attained a stature asteroids didn't. The two objects are considered protoplanets. They acquired enough mass to undergo processes that led to subsurface redistribution of material based on density – a process known as diferentiation and one milestone during the transition from a ball of cosmic rubble to a planet.

The duo's growth, however, was stunted – frozen in time – by gravity from a rapidly bulking Jupiter. Thus, researchers hold that Vesta and Ceres can provide unique insights on an important stage of planet formation that until now has been the province of computer models.

Hubble Space Telescope images of Vesta, as fuzzy as they are, still point to an object with variations in minerals across the surface and hint at interesting features on its surface, notes Carol Raymond, the deputy lead scientist for the Dawn mission.

As the research team pored over images the craft has taken since it arrived, it was clear Vesta's variety has been generated by more than material ejected and spread over the surface by periodic collisions with other objects.

"We have strong structural features that have been preserved over billions of years. We have apparent layering of the surface. The degree to which Vesta appears to have preserved a geologic record is something that's very thrilling," Dr. Raymond says. "It's a small world that's quite unique."

The northern half of Vesta is relatively old and heavily cratered, she explains. But the southern half? It's looking like a planetary geologist's dream, members of the science team suggest.

Perhaps Vesta's most striking feature is an enormous impact basin at its south pole, notes Paul Schenk, a researcher at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston and a member of Dawn's science team.

Hints of something unusual there appear in Hubble images taken in the late 1990s.

Now it appears the feature might qualify as one of the Seven Wonders of the Solar System. The basin is nearly 300 miles across and between 12 and 15 miles deep. In its center sits the asteroid belt's version of Mt. Everest – a mountain whose base spans just over 100 miles and whose summit soars an average of about 13 miles above the surrounding terrain.

"It's one of the deepest impact craters we've seen in the solar system," he says, adding that it hosts one of the biggest mountains yet found in the solar system.

As if that wasn't enough to suggest Vesta had a rough childhood, the impact basin, dubbed Rhea Silvia, sits atop an older basin of somewhat smaller diameter. "We didn't expect this," Dr. Schenk says, noting that the team has also identified several other, older impact basis north of Rhea Silvia.

One reason the basins are of interest: Researchers hold that meteorites exhibiting a wide range of ages known as HED meteorites come from Vesta. Scientists hope to be able to associate these with some of the impact features they see on Vesta.

Vesta has adorned its surface with another puzzle: long, parallel troughs that look as though some giant held the protoplanet in one hand, turned it slowly, then repeatedly allowed its fingertips to trace the pattern along Vesta's equator.

The troughs have steep, scarp-like walls, flat floors up to 15 miles wide, and stretch up to two-thirds of the way around the sphere.

Vesta's northern hemisphere boasts troughs as well, although they appear more time-worn, says Debra Buczkowski, a planetary geologist at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. One of these is roughly 24 miles wide.

As if to underscore Vesta's in-between status, she notes that in some ways the fractures "are behaving like the fractures we would expect on an asteroid. But the sheer scale of them is more similar to what we would see on a planet."

In many ways, these observations are warm-ups. Dawn's instruments carried out these and other measurements during a 21-day survey phase, orbiting some 1,700 miles above Vesta. The craft has now dropped to a 420-mile-high orbit and will begin its lowest-altitude passes – less than 110 miles up – in December.

With each step down the orbital ladder toward Vesta, researches say they expect more remarkable surprises as they map its topography and the minerals it holds.

Deceased--Michael J. Drake

Michael J. Drake
July 8th, 1946 to September 21st, 2011

"Michael J. Drake, Planetary Scientist, Dies at 65"

by

Paul Vitello

October 2, 2011

The New York Times

Michael J. Drake, a planetary scientist, worked on many NASA space missions in his lifetime. But he remained devoted to one idea that he proposed several times in the last decade and that NASA officials rejected twice: to send a spacecraft to an asteroid, take rock samples from the surface and bring them home to study the origins of life.

The expedition finally received NASA’s approval on May 24 after a grueling two-year review process, during which Dr. Drake continued working despite receiving a diagnosis of liver cancer and undergoing liver transplant surgery.

His exhilaration about the go-ahead sustained him as his health declined in recent months, and it kept him involved in plans for the mission’s 2016 launching “to his last breath,” said his wife, Gail Georgenson. He died on Sept. 21 in Tucson. He was 65.

Dr. Drake, the head of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, was a leader in the field of extraterrestrial geology. He studied lunar rocks, meteors and the moons of Saturn. He helped map the surface of Mars and was part of a NASA team that detected the presence of ice below the Martian surface in 2002.

But Dr. Drake, like many planetary scientists, considered asteroids the most promising frontier for exploring what he described in his writing as the “big picture questions.”

In an interview shortly after NASA announced its decision to finance the asteroid mission, which is dubbed Osiris-Rex, he listed some of the questions he hoped it would help answer: “Where do we come from? How did we come to exist? What’s the origin of the organic material that provided the building blocks that led to life?” he said.

Asteroids are considered the original stuff of the solar system — leftover scraps from the cataclysmic nebula collapse in which the solar system was formed 4.5 billion years ago. They were relatively untouched by collisions and other events that might have incinerated the surfaces of larger bodies like the planets, changing the molecular structure of their original terrains. A sample from the surface of an asteroid might prove (or disprove) one of planetary science’s big emerging theories: that the Earth was scorched and barren until it was “reseeded” eons ago by asteroids.

“We already know that amino acids exist in space, and we find them in some meteorites: chipped-off asteroids that strike Earth,” Dr. Drake said. “We believe it’s the sort of stuff that came in through the Earth’s atmosphere and provided the building blocks of life.”

“The asteroid is literally a time capsule of 4.5 billion years,” he added.

Michael Julian Drake was born on July 8, 1946, in Bristol, England, to Betty Eileen Mary and Allen Drake. He graduated with a degree in geology from Victoria University in Manchester and received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the University of Oregon.

After postdoctoral studies at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., he joined the faculty of the University of Arizona in 1973. He met his wife and remained in Tucson for the rest of his life.

Besides his wife, he is survived by their two children, Matthew and Melissa; a granddaughter; and his father and sister, Lisbeth, of East Sussex, England.

Along with colleagues, Dr. Drake worked on the Cassini mission to explore Saturn; the Gamma-Ray Spectrometer aboard the Mars Odyssey Orbiter, which first detected Mars’s ice; and the Phoenix Mars Lander, which landed in 2008 in search of Martian water and microbial life.

The NASA asteroid mission, which will cost $800 million, is basically as Dr. Drake proposed it: a spacecraft will travel to an asteroid known as 1999-RQ36, a rock about the size of Grand Central Terminal somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. The trip will take about four years. Robotic devices on the spacecraft will take measurements, photographs and readings, then scoop about two ounces of material from the asteroid’s surface to be sent back to Earth in a capsule, which is scheduled to land on the floor of the Utah desert sometime in 2023.

A secondary but not insignificant goal of the mission, as Dr. Drake designed it, will be figuring out how the trajectory of an asteroid like RQ36 might be changed if it ever happened to be heading in our direction.

Two criteria were used in selecting RQ36 as the mission’s destination, Dr. Drake said. The asteroid seemed from telescope studies to be rich in carbon and other elements found in organic compounds, making it a good candidate for testing the life-came-from-a-meteor theory.

Second, the path of RQ36’s orbit put it on a course for a possible collision with Earth in 2086. (NASA calculates the chance of that as one in 1,800.) Measurements taken by the spacecraft will help determine what kind of human-sent shove or bump, in the worst-case scenario, might keep that from happening.

On the day NASA announced its plan for the Osiris-Rex mission, an elated Dr. Drake summed up its scope. It would be about nothing less than “the origin and destiny of humanity,” he said. “The ‘origin’ is ‘Where did the organics come from that led to us?’ The ‘destiny’ is ‘Will we go the way of the dinosaurs?’ ”

Asteroids in NASA's crosshairs

What an idiotic idea to spend bucks and talent to think of this now. Efforts can better be placed elsewhere.

"Daunting space task -- send astronauts to asteroid"

by

Seth Borenstein

July 23rd, 2011

Associated Press

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: Send astronauts to an asteroid in less than 15 years.

The challenges are innumerable. Some old-timers are grousing about it, saying going back to the moon makes more sense. But many NASA brains are thrilled to have such an improbable assignment.

And NASA leaders say civilization may 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. Reaching it might require a NASA spacecraft to harpoon it. Heck, astronauts couldn't even walk on it because they'd float away.

NASA is thinking about jetpacks, tethers, bungees, nets and spiderwebs to allow explorers to float just above the surface of it while attached to a smaller mini-spaceship.

Such a ship - something like a "Star Trek" shuttlecraft melded with a deep sea explorer with pincer-like arms- is needed just to get within working distance of the rock. That craft would have to be big enough for astronauts to live in for a week or two. They'd still need a larger habitat for the long term.

It would take half a year to reach an asteroid, based on current possible targets. The deep space propulsion system to fly such a distance isn't perfected yet. Football-field-sized solar panels would help, meaning the entire mothership complex would be fairly large. It would have to protect the space travelers from killer solar and cosmic ray bursts. And, they would need a crew capsule, maybe two, for traveling between the asteroid complex and Earth.

And all those parts - mini-spaceship, habitat/living area, crew capsule, solar arrays and propulsion system - would have to be linked together in the middle of space, assembled in a way like the International Space Station but on a smaller scale.

Beyond all those obstacles, NASA doesn't even know which asteroid would be the best place to visit.

All this has to be ready to launch by 2025 by presidential order.

"This is the big step," said Kent Joosten, chief architect of the human exploration team at Johnson Space Center. "This is out into the universe, away from Earth's gravity completely... This is really where you are doing the `Star Trek' kind of thing."

It has the dreamers of NASA both excited and anxious.

"This is a risky mission. It's a challenging mission," said NASA chief technology officer Bobby Braun. "It's the kind of mission that engineers will eat up."

This is a matter of sending "humans farther than ever before," said NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver. It is all a stepping stone to the dream of flying astronauts to Mars in the mid 2030s.

"I think it is THE mission NASA should embrace," said University of Tennessee aerospace professor John Muratore. "To be successful at this mission, you've got to embrace all of the technologies that you need for Mars."

Critics, including former Apollo astronauts and flight directors, have blasted President Barack Obama for canceling George W. Bush's plan to return astronauts to the moon. They dismiss talk of asteroid visits.

But that's because NASA has not done a good job of outlining the fascinating details and explaining why it is important, said astronomer and former astronaut John Grunsfeld.

"NASA doesn't have a story right now," said Grunsfeld, deputy director at the Space Telescope Science Institute. "Exploration is nothing if not the articulation of a great story."

The story begins with why NASA would want to go to an asteroid. The agency has sent small spacecraft off to study asteroids over the years and even landed on one in 2001. Just last week, a space probe began orbiting a huge asteroid called Vesta, which lies beyond Mars.

Scientifically, an asteroid is a remnant from the birth of the solar system, offering clues about how our planetary system began. Logistically, NASA wants to go to Mars, but that is distant and more difficult. So the argument is that going to an asteroid is a better testing ground than returning to the moon.

The reason NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and others give is that this mission could save civilization. Every 100 million years or so an asteroid 6 miles wide - the type that killed off the dinosaurs- smacks Earth, said NASA Near Earth Object program manager Donald Yeomans.

If NASA can get astronauts to an asteroid, they can figure out a way of changing a potential killer's orbit. They'll experiment with the safe one they land on, Braun said.

One joke going around is that dinosaurs couldn't stop catastrophe because they didn't have a space program.

"One of the statements going to an asteroid will make is that humans are smarter than dinosaurs," Grunsfeld said.

If you are going to reroute a killer asteroid, first you have to know one is coming and where it is now. And that's also a problem for NASA's mission. Astronomers figure there are about 50,000 asteroids and comets larger than 300 feet in diameter and they only know where fewer than 1 percent of them are, Yeomans said. NASA is focusing on rocks that size or larger that would come relatively close to Earth in the 2025 time frame.

At the moment, there are only a handful of asteroid options and they all have names like 1999AO10 or 2009OS5. NASA deputy exploration chief Laurie Leshin figures NASA will have to come up with, not just more targets, but better names.

Getting to one will be even tougher.

Huge powerful rockets are needed to launch spacecraft and parts out of Earth orbit. NASA promises to announce its design idea for these rockets by the end of the summer and Congress has ordered that they be built by 2016. It will take two or three or maybe even more launches of these unnamed rockets to get all the needed parts into space.

The crew capsule is the farthest along because NASA is using the Orion crew ship it was already designing for the now dead moon mission and repurposing it for deep space. NASA has already spent $5 billion on Orion.

Once in space, the ship needs a propulsion system to get it to the asteroid. One way is to use traditional chemical propulsion, but that would require carrying lots of hard-to-store fuel and creation of a new storage system, Joosten said.

Another way is to use ion propulsion, which is efficient and requires less fuel, but it is enormously slow to rev up and gain speed. It would also require an electrical ignition source, thus the giant solar power wings.

If NASA goes to ion propulsion, the best bet would be to start the bulk of the ship on a trip to and around the moon without astronauts. That would take a while, but if no one is on it, it doesn't matter, Joosten said. Then when that ship is far from Earth, astronauts aboard Orion would dock and join the rest of the trip. By this time, the ship would have picked up sufficient speed and keep on accelerating.

Orion isn't big enough for four astronauts to live on for a year. They would need a larger space habitat, a place where they can exercise to keep from losing bone strength in zero gravity. They would need a place to store food, sleep and most importantly a storm shelter to protect them from potentially deadly and radiation-loaded solar flares.

Much of the habitat could be inflatable, launched in a lightweight form, and inflated in space. On Friday, NASA announced a competition among four universities to design potential exploration habitats.

Meanwhile NASA is pursuing its concept for a mini-spaceship exploration vehicle, about the size of a minivan. And it's planning an underwater lab for training, an effort to mimic an asteroid mission's challenges, Joosten said.

Leshin notes 2025 is not that many years away: "There's a lot of things we need to invent and build between now and then."

Humbleness on November 20th, 2008

Just a reminder that wars, hunger, despots, economic issues, and pirates of the Indian Ocean pale when thoughts of the possibility of human extinction are contemplated...Canadian police car cam caught this spectacular event.

Edmonton, Canada
November 20th, 2008

Fragility of the human species