Mission to an Asteroid

I have previously discussed the need for planetary defense and the required ability to send astronauts  beyond Earth orbit. So how far off are we from being able to send people to the near Earth  asteroids? Well, Lockheed Martin  have just release a study of such a mission. They looked at a minimal two person mission using two Orion spacecrafts. From the executive summary:

In the last decade, the search for hazardous asteroids which might impact Earth has yielded an unexpected benefit. Astronomers have discovered a few dozen very small asteroids whose  orbits around the Sun are similar to Earth’s. Round trip missions to these asteroids are therefore much easier than to previously known Near Earth Asteroids, and roughly as easy as landing on the Moon. These asteroids represent a new potential destination for near-term human space exploration. Since favorable mission opportunities occur only a few times per decade, it probably would not be prudent to focus the human spaceflight program exclusively on asteroid exploration and develop new spacecraft customized for asteroid missions. Instead, asteroid exploration should be conducted in parallel with other missions such as Lagrange point visits or lunar landings, using common spacecraft designed for multiple types of missions. The authors have investigated the feasibility of conducting an asteroid mission that would complement NASA’s lunar exploration architecture, using the launch vehicles and Orion spacecraft which would be used for lunar exploration. The proposed mission concept, called Plymouth Rock, combines a pair of Orion spacecraft with only modest modifications to provide the necessary propulsion, living space, and life support capability for two astronauts. Human asteroid missions have many of the same functional requirements as lunar landings, so that complementary asteroid and lunar missions may be feasible even if the lunar exploration architecture changes from the current plan.
We have concluded that the dual-Orion configuration can probably support deep space mission durations of five to six months. Longer missions are constrained by radiation exposure, volumetric packaging limits for life support consumables, and the small habitable volume available. There are at least three opportunities between 2015 and 2030 when such a mission could be performed. These occur in 2019-2020, 2028, and 2029. All of the asteroids in question are small, between 5 m and 50 m in diameter. The number of opportunities is increasing as more asteroids are discovered. A dual-Orion configuration probably represents the minimum
capability necessary to perform an asteroid mission. Several additional mission opportunities to larger asteroids would be feasible for an upgraded spacecraft with a larger propulsion system. Desire for enhanced capabilities, such as a larger crew size and improved extravehicular activity (EVA) support may drive the need for a larger spacecraft. One of the two Orion spacecraft could be modified into an Orion Deep Space Vehicle with a larger habitat module suited for deep space operations rather than reentry.
By sending astronauts to explore these asteroids and bring back samples for study on Earth, we can learn about the formation and evolution of our solar system. We can improve our understanding of the threat to our planet from asteroid impacts, develop the practical knowledge needed to protect ourselves if necessary and even test this capability. We could also assess the feasibility of harnessing asteroid resources for a growing human civilization. If performed prior to the next lunar landing, a mission like Plymouth Rock can support lunar exploration plans by proving out the launch vehicles, spacecraft, and many of the operations for a lunar mission before the lunar lander is ready, much as the Apollo 8 mission did in 1968. A mission to an asteroid would also be valuable practice for a trip to Mars. Progressively more challenging asteroid missions provide an opportunity to incrementally develop expertise needed for long missions in deep space, without the leap in cost, complexity, duration, distance, and radiation exposure required for a Mars mission.

Of course theres a bit of a problem with all this, the Orion spacecraft does not exist and is no longer supported by the Obama administration.;
Note: Trent Waddington blogs regularly on asteroid missions and is worth following.

Its getting crowded out there

Have a look at this video. It shows all the new asteroids discovered since 1980. 

From Youtube:View of the solar system showing the locations of all the asteroids starting in 1980, as asteroids are discovered they are added to the map and highlighted white so you can pick out the new ones.
The final colour of an asteroids indicates how closely it comes to the inner solar system.
Earth Crossers are Red
Earth Approachers (Perihelion less than 1.3AU) are Yellow
All Others are Green

Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You’ll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.

As the video moves into the mid 1990’s we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you’ll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.

At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that’s tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths.

Currently we have observed over half a million minor planets, and the discovery rates snow no sign that we’re running out of undiscovered objects.

Orbital elements were taken from the ‘astorb.dat’ data created by Ted Bowell and associates at http://www.naic.edu/~nolan/astorb.html

Hayabusa lands in Australia!

Its been a good week for the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA. First they had the successful deployment of their solar sail now the Hayabusa spacecraft returns to Earth with its precious cargo of asteroid dust:

A JAPANESE space probe carrying dust samples from an asteroid has landed in the South Australian outback in a historic landing scientists hope will reveal the secrets behind our universe.

The Hayabusa probe is the first to have made physical contact with an asteroid and returned to Earth, landing just before midnight (CST) yesterday, the Australian Science Media Centre confirmed.

The capsule parachuted to Earth within the Woomera Prohibited Area, a remote military zone 485km northwest of Adelaide.

Woomera is a big place, about the size of England, so I hope  they find the canister. Here is a video of the re-entry.

Mystery Object approaches Earth

Image of asteroid 2010 AL30 taken on Jan 12 at 15h 46m GMT with a 35cm Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope – Credit: Dave Herald

 

Theres a strange object called 2010 AL30 approaching Earth. What is it? Is it a small asteroid? Or is it a man made object? Perhaps space junk? Opinion is still divided but we should know soon.:

ASTRONOMERS will tonight get their best look at a “mystery object” orbiting the Earth just a third of the distance out to the moon.

Named 2010 AL30, the object will pass within 130,000km of the Earth at 12:48 GMT (22:48 AEDT).

It is between 10-15m long, meaning there is no chance it could ever have an impact on the planet, but it is certainly causing plenty of discussion in scientific circles.

Experts are divided over whether the object is man-made or a small asteroid.

Italian scientists Ernesto Guido and Giovanni Sostero told Ria Novosti it had an orbital period of almost exactly one year and might be a spent rocket booster.

But Alan Harris at the US Space Science Institute said the object had a “perfectly ordinary Earth-crossing orbit”.

“Unlikely to be artificial, its orbit doesn’t resemble any useful spacecraft trajectory, and its encounter velocity with Earth is not unusually low,” he posted to The Minor Planet Mailing List.

Expert astronomers will be able to see it shining with a brightness of a 14th-magnitude star similar to that of Pluto.

It will appear moving through the constellations of Orion, Taurus and Pisces, according to NASA’s Solar System Dynamics website.

Heres an animation of the flyby by Gerhard Dangl :

For more information try these two links.

Asteroid Opportunity

A few days ago another small asteroid whizzed by the Earth:

Sky-watchers in Asia, Australia, and the Pacific islands welcomed a surprise guest Monday: an asteroid that passed just 41,010 miles (66,000 kilometers) above Earth.

Discovered only days ago, asteroid 2009 DD45 zipped between our planet and the moon at 13:44 universal time (8:44 a.m. ET). The asteroid was moving at about 12 miles (20 kilometers) a second when it was closest to Earth.

“We get objects passing fairly close, or closer than this, every few months,” Timothy Spahr, director of the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center in Massachusetts, said in an email.

“Also, though, note these are only the ones that are discovered. Many more pass this close undetected”—as asteroid 2009 DD45 nearly did.

Astronomers didn’t notice the oncoming asteroid until February 28, when it showed up as a faint dot in pictures taken at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.

At that point the asteroid was already a mere 1.5 million miles (2.4 million kilometers) from Earth, and closing in fast.

Which got me thinking… wouldn’t it be good if a small space probe could be sent to explore such asteroids and leave a radio beacon behind to track them. The problem is that there’s usually only short notice of a close approach , far to short a time frame to plan and launch a spacecraft. So why not park several small space probes in orbit and when the next asteroid approaches send one off to follow? I doubt they would need to wait long for the opportunity. The L4 or L5 orbits would be a good place to store the spacecraft as they could use the gravitational fields of the Earth/Moon system to help accelerate them to the asteroid.

Stopping the Next Celestial Armageddon

Humanity faces a celestial Sword of Damocles. We can no longer go about our humdrum worldly concerns and abandon any attention to the heavens and the dangers that lurk in the local celestial neighbourhood. We face the celestial equivalent of a 9/11 writ large. Humanity can no longer ignore the objective reality that its long term survival and existence is imperilled.

It sounds like a Hollywood blockbuster: a deadly asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. But in reality, it’s only a matter of time before a giant space rock threatens to wipe out civilization. An asteroid took out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. Are we next? This episode analyzes the threat and explores the many ways–from a nuclear bomb to ingenious new technology–that experts are proposing to stop Armageddon. Humanity faces an Extraterrestrial Imperative– we either become a spacefaring civilization or face the fate of the dinosaurs.

The Universe – Stopping Armageddon

Earth’s new neighbor

We have a new neighbor, a small asteroid called 2009 DB:

An asteroid the size of a small house is slowly passing through space less than twice as far away as our moon.

The recently discovered space rock poses no immediate threat. It will, however, hang around.

The asteroid, catalogued as 2009 BD, is an oddity. Astronomers think it might be what’s known as a co-orbital asteroid, “circling the sun in near-tandem with our planet,” according to the web site Spaceweather.com.

Spaceweather.com has this to say:

Newly-discovered asteroid 2009 BD is slowly passing by Earth today only 400,000 miles away. The small 10m-wide space rock poses no threat, but it merits attention anyway. The orbit of 2009 BD appears to be almost identical to the orbit of Earth. 2009 BD may be a rare co-orbital asteroid, circling the sun in near-tandem with our planet. Extrapolating the motion of 2009 BD into the future, we see that it remains in the vicinity of Earth for many months to come, never receding farther than 0.1 AU (9.3 million miles) until Nov. 2010

Its unfortunate theres no quick launch facility available that could get a space probe out there to have a look at it. More here.

Dandridge Cole: In the Words of his Best Friend Roy Scarfo

It appears that my last article ‘Islands in Space: The Challenge of the Planetoids, the Pioneering Work of Dandridge M. Cole’, has attracted quite of bit of interest amongst space enthusiasts far and wide. I was especially surprised and honoured to receive a letter dated August 9th. It was from a very close friend and associate of Dandridge Cole’s – Roy Scarfo.

Alex,
Great post on Dan Cole, A very dear and missed friend.
Roy

Roy has had a very long and distinguished career as a space artist, writer and futurist. He also coauthored Beyond Tomorrow with Dan Cole. This book is one of the great classics of a whole body of literature devoted to speculation concerning humanity’s future in space and the possibility of creating a spacefaring civilization. I am happy to report that several copies of this book were recently found in pristine condition in a warehouse and are available for purchase courtesy of Roy Scarfo.

I am also honoured that Roy has accepted my invitation to submit a guest blog. So with great pleasure, and a very special thank you to Roy, I would like to present without further delay Roy’s submission to the Discovery-Enterprise.

__________________________________________________________

I have been asked by Alex Bonnici to submit a guest article concerning Dan Cole for the “Discovery Enterprise” blog. I would first refer the readers who are interested in the life of Dandridge Cole to first read two posts on my blog The Future in Space for a little background.

One post is titled ‘About Dandridge Cole‘ and the other post is ‘Mechanism of Resurrection.’

Dan in the early sixties was considered the most futuristic thinker living at the time. Articles on him appeared in most of the prominent magazines and newspapers throughout the world. Our association began at GE’s Space Technology Center in Valley Forge, PA, at the time considered the largest private facility devoted to space research in the world. We were both employees there. We worked on many projects together but it’s hard to remember what they all were. Our major project together was the book “Beyond Tomorrow” published by Amherst Press in 1964. We would meet in the evenings after work in my office at GE and discuss the various chapters one by one, page by page, word by word, for a period of over a year. Our discussions took us to every area of space exploration and life and beyond.

Our work together gave us a handle as “the weird couple” because of the way-out material we were producing together. Today many of those concepts are as common as soap. The majority of our work together was done outside our regular responsibilities at GE, although sometimes they overlapped. We would meet almost daily for lunch at the cafeteria and afterward walk and talk during the rest of our lunch hour. This went on for years.

Our personal lives were usually never discussed, and therefore, I knew little of Dan’s personal life. Last year one of Dan’s daughters from Michigan contacted me wanting to learn more about him since she was very young when he died. We met at our home over lunch at which time we both learned something new about Dan.

One thing in Dan’s life of which he was most proud was his service as a paratrooper with the 597th Airborne Engineers during WWII. He wrote many poems, music and lyrics about his experiences as a paratrooper. One follows:

To My Parachute

Copyright 1944 by Dandridge M. Cole

Lotus blossom drifting

White against
the blue,

Hearken while I humbly

Give my thanks to
you.

Never was there flower

Half
so fair to see;

Never has a maiden

Done so much for
me,

As your bloom above me,

While
I’m floating high;

Borne by silken panels

Gently
through the sky.

When I look above
me

At my panels strong,

My heart fills up with
smiles,

Gratitude and song.

There
is not a blossom,

Maid, nor setting sun

That compares
in beauty

To you, my pretty
one.

Hear me, staunch
protector,

Angel Gabriel,

Let me down, but
gently,

Do your duty well.

Catch
me as I hurtle

Toward the ground below;

Jerk my
bruis-ed shoulders…

Never let me
go.

Gabriel, my angel

Guardian, so
true,

May I always find you

White against the
blue.

Roy Scarfo

http://www.royscarfo.com/

www.thefutureinspace.com/blog

__________________________________________________________

I was also rather surprised and extremely honoured to receive a comment from Dan Cole’s son Stephen Dandridge Cole:

Thank you for the fine article on my father.

You mention meeting Don Cox and also the idea that it would be good to republish Islands in Space. Are you aware that something of the sort was done? In 1996 Don Cox contacted another old friend of both himself and my father, Jim Chestek, and together they published “Doomsday Asteroid” (admittedly a more sensational title!) Capitalizing on recent interest in and concern about asteroid impacts, it draws on and updates the older book.

And apropos of Mr. Zebrowski’s interesting novel, Macrolife (of which I have an early copy – perhaps I should get the new edition) I might also mention his Sunspacers trilogy and Skylife, which he co-edited. These both also reflect or allude to the realms that my father envisioned.

August 24, 2007 10:48 PM

Thank you, Stephen for your kind words. I did indeed meet Jim Chestek I was sitting next to him during Don Cox’s presentation at the ISDC in New York back in 1996. And, it was he who formally introduced me to Donald Cox.

I have such wonderful memories of that conference.

Alex

I would also like to express a very special thank you to my fellow bloggers Ralph Buttigieg and Dennis Chamberland for choosing my article for our blog’s submission to The Carnival of Space.

Islands in Space: The Challenge of the Planetoids, the Pioneering Work of Dandridge M. Cole

NASA is again considering the feasibility of manned missions to the asteroids. However, this idea is not without precedent. Scientists began seriously considering asteroids as targets of exploration in the 1960s. The leading proponent of such missions was American aerospace engineer and futurist – Dandridge MacFarland Cole.

October 30th, 2005 marked the 40th anniversary of his untimely passing. Dandridge Cole was only 44 years old when he suffered a fatal heart attack. The anniversary of his death seems to have largely escaped the notice and attention of the space community at large. This brief article seeks to redress that awful oversight.

NASA and the aerospace community owe an enormous debt to this great man. In his book ‘Islands in Space: The Challenge of the Planetoids’, co-authored with Donald Cox, he laid the foundation for much of our current thinking on the Exploration, Mining, and Colonization of the Asteroids.

Cole and Cox, from the vantage point of 1964, had foreseen the great wilderness that lay ahead of the U.S. space program after the Apollo program had achieved its objective of placing a man on the Moon. They had predicted, unlike many of their contemporises that a great hiatus laid between the first lunar landing and the eventual goal of landing men on Mars. A full decade of technological development would stall the American Space program until the super boosters and nuclear engines, needed to take astronauts to Mars, replaced the Saturn 5. Until these technical milestones were achieved, they felt that a manned mission to the Asteroids should be seriously considered as the next logical goal for the post-Apollo era.

Recently, within NASA there has been ongoing discussion of the possibility of mounting a manned voyage to a Near-Earth Object (NEO). Its advocates are certain of the tremendous scientific return of such an undertaking. Dandridge Cole was one of the first scientists to draw the broad outlines of such a mission. In the early 1960s, he studied the possibility of using Apollo hardware for a mission to Eros, during its close approach to Earth in 1975.

Cole and Cox also outlined many of the robotic precursor missions to the asteroids that have largely inspired those that were realised over the past few years (such as NEAR and Hayabusa) and those yet to be flown (such as the Dawn mission to Ceres and Vesta). In addition, they saw the importance of establishing beachheads on the Martian moons Phobos and Demos to facilitate the exploration of the planet.

In 1963, Cole wrote ‘Exploring the Secrets of Space: Astronautics for the Layman’ with I. M. Levitt. In this book they suggested hollowing out an ellipsoidal asteroid about 30 km long, and rotating it about its major axis to simulate gravity. By reflecting sunlight inside with mirrors, and creating, on its inner surface, a pastoral setting an asteroid could be transformed into a permanent space colony. Cole and Cox also envisioned that asteroids would provide the raw materials to form the basis of a spacefaring civilization. And, that asteroidal materials would also serve terrestrial needs. In their view these materials could be transported using mass drivers or linear motors. Cole’s work largely presages that of Gerard K. O’Neill by more than a decade.

A year later, Cole and Cox elaborated this idea further. They went on to consider the possibility of using asteroids as interstellar arks or generation ships. The “nomadic pseudo-earth,” as Cole and Cox called their conception, would be the hollowed out space inside a captured asteroid. The result would be a “gigantic geodesic interior chamber,” created “in much the same way as a glassblower shapes a small solid lump of molten glass into a large empty bottle.” Thus Cole, like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Goddard before him, envisaged that asteroids would be the stepping-stones paving the path to the outer solar system and beyond. Cole in his 1961 book ‘The Ultimate Human Society’ also argued that huge space colonies might evolve into new organisms called “Macro-Life” composed of innumerable living creatures. Cole wrote:

“Taking man as representative of multicelled life, we can say that man is the mean proportional between Macro-Life and the cell. Macro-Life is a new life form of gigantic size which has for its cells individual human beings, plants, animals, and machines . . . Society can be said to pregnant with a mutant creature which will be at the same time an extraterrestrial colony of human beings and a new large-scale life form.”

A Time magazine article from January 1961 provides a very interesting profile of Dandridge Cole during this period of his life.

In 1965, Cole co-authored with Roy Scarfo, ‘Beyond Tomorrow: The Next 50 Years in Space’ in which he proposed various other space projects and the use of cryogenics so that individuals could travel great distances while in a state of suspended animation.

Considering Dandridge Cole’s many accomplishments, why is there such an enormous dearth in the number of websites devoted to the memory of this great visionary? I had the great privilege of meeting Donald Cox at the National Space Society’s 1996 International Space Development Congress (ISDC) in New York City. He graciously autographed my copy of ‘Islands in Space’. We spent the better part of fifteen minutes discussing the valuable insights, he and Cole discussed in that book and how it pertained to humanity’s future in space. It is one of my most cherished possessions. In fact, I consider ‘Islands in Space’ a very seminal work in the history of astronautics and should be republished along side other great works in the field.