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Official Confirms NASA Plan to Capture an Asteroid
An artist’s illustration of an asteroid retrieval spacecraft capturing a 7-meter-wide, 500-ton asteroid. Rick Sternbach/Keck Institute for Space Studies.
Rumors have been leaking out for over a week, but now according to Alan Boyle at NBC News’ Cosmic Log, a senior Obama administration official has confirmed that $100 million is being sought for NASA’s budget request for the coming fiscal year for work to allow a robotic spaceship to capture a small asteroid and park it near the Moon for astronauts to explore. The spacecraft would capture a 500-ton, 7- meter (25-foot) asteroid in 2019. Then using an Orion space capsule, a crew of about four astronauts would station-keep with the space rock in 2021 to allow for EVAs for exploration. This plan would accelerate NASA’s deep space missions with Orion and prepare crews for going to Mars.
NBC news quoted the official — who spoke on condition of anonymity because there was no authorization to discuss the plan publicly — as saying the mission would “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.”
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Read the rest of Official Confirms NASA Plan to Capture an Asteroid (369 words)
© nancy for Universe Today, 2013. |
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2013-04-06 14:46:20
Source: http://www.universetoday.com/101287/official-confirms-nasa-plan-to-capture-an-asteroid/
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