Obama’s NASA Plan to Go Into “Deep Space”; Land on Asteroid?
Yesterday, President Obama outlined NASA’s new path during a visit to the Kennedy Space Center. Not only did he mention flying beyond the moon, but actually landing on an asteroid.
“By 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the moon into deep space,” he said. “We’ll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history.”
Space experts say such a voyage could take several months longer than a journey to the moon and entail far greater dangers.
“It is really the hardest thing we can do,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. Sounding like this guys working jobs in administration are probably a lot more optimistic than he is.
Although the trip will be difficult to accomplish it is expected to be a precursor of traveling to Mars WAY down the road.
Billy Nye The Science Guy had this to say: “You could be saving humankind. That’s worthy, isn’t it?”
Landing on an asteroid and giving it a well-timed nudge “would demonstrate once and for all that we’re smarter than the dinosaurs and can avoid what they didn’t,” said White House science adviser John Holdren.
Experts don’t have a particular asteroid in mind for the deep-space voyage, but there are a few dozen top candidates, most of which pass within about 5 million miles of Earth. That is 20 times more distant than the moon, which is about 239,000 miles from Earth on average.
Most of the top asteroid candidates are less than a quarter-mile across. The moon is about 2,160 miles in diameter.
Going to an asteroid could provide clues about the solar system’s formation, because asteroids are essentially fossils from 4.6 billion years ago, when planets first formed, said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object program at the Jet Propulsion Lab.
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Filed under: Space, Space Tech by JMH
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Overcoming the technical problems of getting to an asteroid would solve also solve many of the technical problems of traveling to other plants. Actually “landing” on one (there would be little gravity to help, so it’s not a trivial challenge), may be the only way to set charges needed to break one destined for a collision with earth into smaller pieces, or redirect it.
I know we like to think it would be useful to reach another planet, but other planets don’t really appear to be a potential threat to our existence at this time.