posted 06-20-2013 10:31 AM               

Bolden and Saggese also discussed NASA's plans for a new asteroid initiative, previously announced in President Obama's fiscal year 2014 budget proposal. Saggese expressed the strong interest of Italy for the initiative and welcomed the opportunity to discuss potential ASI participation in a long-term exploration strategy.

posted 06-20-2013 05:30 PM               

And no one is suggesting abandoning the moon. To the contrary, NASA is suggesting that the moon should be explored — by commercial and international entities, with NASA's help. More than four decades later, the U.S. government shouldn't be the only entity capable of exploring and exploiting the moon.

The U.S. is however, the only country that is going to send humans to Mars. As Charles Bolden correctly said (and I'm paraphrasing from memory), if NASA is not going to Mars, than no one is going.

Returning this thread to its original topic, I still fail to understand the objection to the asteroid mission.

The retrieval part of the mission is a robotics mission — it competes with Mars rovers and probes to Jupiter, not human tended lunar outposts or Mars colonies. It is a technology demonstrator that combines advanced propulsion and robotics technologies in a way such that its components will have other uses in space, too.

posted 09-12-2013 02:26 PM               

The US space agency has narrowed its hunt for an asteroid to capture to three, NASA said.

The asteroids fit the requirements of being between seven to 10 meters (yards) in size, and further study should be able to narrow the choice even more, scientists said at a conference in San Diego, California.

"We have two to three which we will characterize in the next year and if all goes well... those will be valid candidates that could be certified targets," said Paul Chodas, senior scientist at the NASA Near-Earth Object Program Office.

posted 01-20-2014 09:53 AM               

From SpaceflightNow.com:

Congress gave NASA a funding level just shy of the White House's request of $17.72 billion, but the appropriation pads the space agency's deep space exploration programs, setting the Orion multipurpose crew vehicle's budget at $1.2 billion and the Space Launch System's funding line at $1.6 billion, more than $200 million more than NASA said it needed to meet a 2017 launch date for an unmanned test flight.

In a legislative report accompanying the budget, Congress refused to commit to NASA's proposed asteroid redirect mission to retrieve a 500-ton rock from solar orbit, guide it around the moon with a robotic spacecraft, then send astronauts to visit it aboard Orion crew capsules. Lawmakers wrote that NASA needs to justify the asteroid initiative and provide detailed cost estimates before winning congressional support.

While the ARM is still an emerging concept, NASA has not provided Congress with satisfactory justification materials such as detailed cost estimates or impacts to ongoing missions. The completion of significant preliminary activities is needed to appropriately lay the groundwork for the ARM prior to NASA and Congress making a long-term commitment to this mission concept.

posted 01-23-2014 11:51 AM               

If EM-1 does not go to an asteroid, then it orbits around the moon four times and returns to Earth.

posted 08-21-2014 05:32 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by SkyMan1958:
I can't imagine that Orion couldn't bring along a couple EMU EVA suits...

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posted 12-17-2014 04:25 PM               

The review found that both mission designs were feasible but more information was needed about the complexity of Option B. Therefore, the decision between the two options was deferred until the end of February.

There are currently three validated asteroid candidates for the boulder option: Itokawa (the asteroid visited by JAXA's Hayabusa), Bennu (the asteroid to be visited by NASA's OSIRIS-REx) and 2008 EV5.

The three valid candidates so far for the small asteroid concept are 2009 BD, 2011 MD and 2013 EC20.

posted 03-25-2015 06:46 PM               

"For 2008 EV5, which we have identified as the candidate we're doing our detailed [mission] design against, [it] has not been visited by spacecraft and there are no plans [to do so] until we get there with the ARM spacecraft, if that is what we choose as the target for the mission," Lindley Johnson, NASA's Near Earth Object program executive, told reporters. "But it has been extensively observed [to determine] it is a carbonaceous Type-C asteroid, which is of particular interest to scientists because of the volatiles and elements we know to be in those types of asteroids."

"We've a very good idea of its size, shape, spin dynamics and the potential existence of the right-size boulders on its surface," Johnson said.

posted 03-30-2015 01:51 PM               

The asteroid mission concept as originally envisioned involved astronauts going out to an asteroid in its' natural location. Apparently that was too hard for NASA. Then they decided to drag one back to lunar orbit. Apparently that was too hard, too. Now we're left with grabbing a boulder off the asteroid and bringing it back?

If the rock sample is the real intent of the mission (it wasn't) why not just bring it all the way back to LEO? Have SpaceX or somebody devise a plan to bring it to ISS and study it there.

This new concept does even less to get us to Mars than the original plans did, and those didn't have much to offer either. Why does NASA keep lowering the bar?

posted 03-30-2015 02:14 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by 328KF:
Is there anyone left who really supports this mission architecture?

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"If you're not doing something in the mid-2020s, you have stretched out the advance of NASA astronauts into deep space by such a long period, what I fear is that people will lose interest. You'll wind up shutting things down."

"[T]he great value" of an Asteroid Redirect Mission is “development of the first interstellar rocket propulsion system that would carry us to Alpha Centauri and beyond...

posted 03-30-2015 06:02 PM               

Regardless of how inconvenient it might seem, I think the time to re-evaluate this mission is not far off. It appears more and more like NASA is trying to find reasons to justify the thing, and they're not doing a very good job of communicating it to the public.

Rather than having humans fly toward a target, we're going to bring the target, no wait, a small PIECE of the target, to a more suitable spot for study. Never mind that the trip to this location is probably 90% of the way back to Earth and could easily be collected without EM-2.

I wish somebody at HQ would stop saluting and start speaking up about how ridiculous this whole idea has become.

posted 03-30-2015 06:29 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by 328KF:
a small PIECE of the target

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No one has ever attempted to return anything more than soil samples from an asteroid. Regardless the size of the boulder, it will be a feat of robotics and engineering if it succeeds. Were it pitched solely as a flagship robotic science mission I doubt we would be having this debate.

posted 04-10-2015 08:39 AM               

Wayne Hale, former space shuttle program manager, offered an alternative to the asteroid mission. "The rock is not on the way to Mars," Hale said. "Why would you not try to go to Phobos and pick the rock off the surface there?"

Phobos is a small moon of Mars, about 7 miles across.

Science journalist Miles O'Brien, who characterized an asteroid as a "contrived destination, seized upon this idea. "People would get excited about that. I could sell that to editors."

...the authors of this paper have considered a Phobos alternative, and estimate NASA would only be able to grab a rock about 3 or 4 feet across from Phobos, rather than a 13-foot rock from an asteroid.

posted 04-10-2015 03:05 PM               

High-performance solar electric propulsion (SEP) will likely be an important part of an architecture to send humans to Mars. NASA's current plan is to demonstrate a large SEP stage by using it to maneuver a boulder that has been lifted from the surface of a small asteroid, and to move the boulder to cis-lunar space.

Maneuvering a large test mass is not necessary to provide a valid in-space test of a new SEP stage. We therefore find that a SEP mission will contribute more directly to the goal of sending humans to Mars if the mission is focused entirely on development and validation of the SEP stage. We also find that other possible motivations for acquiring and maneuvering a boulder (e.g. asteroid science, planetary defense) do not have value commensurate with their probable cost.

Instead of relocating a boulder from an asteroid, we suggest that a more important and exciting first use of this new SEP stage would be a round trip mission to Mars, flying it to Mars orbit and then back to the Earth-moon system and into a distant-retrograde lunar orbit.

posted 04-12-2015 07:38 PM               

The problem has been that NASA has been forced to come up with reasons to do ARM because that's what the President decided. Put a group of talented people on the job and they are going to do admirable work coming with the solutions to accomplish that. But nobody wants to speak up and ask the tough question "why?"

posted 03-08-2016 11:02 AM               

NASA has decided to push back the launch of the robotic part of its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) by a year to late 2021 to allow for more time for studies of the mission concept and its key technologies, an agency official said March 2.

At a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council's human exploration and operations committee here, Michele Gates, program director for ARM at NASA Headquarters, said the delay in the robotic part of ARM would also postpone a later crewed mission to the boulder the robotic mission would return to cislunar space.

"That is intended to enable the early design study work for the spacecraft bus," Gates said of the delay in the robotic mission launch. It will, she added, also allow for more planning work on the mission ahead of later reviews.

Gates said the delay specifically will stretch out ongoing work in the robotic mission's phase A, which will culminate in a review known as Key Decision Point B planned for this summer. NASA will also extend phase B, which will start after that review. "We think that buys us some risk buy-down," she said of the extended schedule.

Under the new schedule, the ARM robotic mission would launch in December 2021, instead of December 2020 as previously planned. That would delay later crewed mission by a year as well, to December 2026. "We understand this, we're accepting this, and we're folding that into our early preformulation work that we're beginning to do" on the crewed mission, she said.

That delay will not affect the mission's cost.

posted 05-24-2016 07:40 AM               

Language in the report dealing with NASA's exploration plans would restrict NASA's ability to fund (ARM). While noting that technologies being developed for ARM could have some future benefits, "the Committee believes that neither a robotic nor a crewed mission to an asteroid appreciably contribute to the overarching mission to Mars," it states. "Further, the long-term costs of launching a robotic craft to the asteroid, followed by a crewed mission, are unknown and will divert scarce resources away from developing technology and equipment necessary for missions to Mars."

"Toward that end, no funds are included in this bill for NASA to continue planning efforts to conduct either robotic or crewed missions to an asteroid," the report states. "Instead, NASA is encouraged to develop plans to return to the Moon to test capabilities that will be needed for Mars."

posted 05-25-2016 02:26 AM            

Instead, NASA is encouraged to develop plans to return to the Moon to test capabilities that will be needed for Mars.

posted 05-25-2016 05:54 AM               

For that to happen, the Senate has to agree with the House to cut funding to the mission, and the President needs to sign the budget bill — assuming Congress can agree to put one forth for his signature.