Asteroid Boulder Retrieval Mission Needs a Precursor Mission
NASA Report Details Expert Team Investigation of Asteroid Redirect Mission
“A new report chartered by NASA provides input to important areas of robotic mission requirements development and explores the science benefits and potential knowledge gain from the agency’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM). NASA will visit an asteroid boulder during the Proving Ground phase of its journey to Mars in cislunar space the volume of space around the moon featuring multiple stable staging orbits for future deep space missions.”
Report: “A precursor to the ARRM target body in order to scout for boulders and provide surface and boulder physical characteristics would effectively increase the characterization phase duration and should be investigated further. This precursor could be a dedicated mission or be co-manifested with the ARV, arriving at the target earlier. Additional benefits would be gained if the precursor had some means of interacting with the surface to provide geotechnical data.”
– Asteroid Boulder Retrieval Mission Starts To Drift Away
– Earlier posts on Bolden and asteroids
Seems like it would be a little pricey to do a precursor mission just to do a flyby. Maybe a potential cubesat candidate mission!
Apparently this is a report from an external assessment team. I am unclear as to whether it is mandatory, advisory, or observational. I don’t see the need for a precursor. I feel it would be more logical to send the ARM mission to the Martian moons, which are likely captured asteroids anyway, and for which fimaging is already available. It would be optimal to focus mainly on in situ analysis with return of multiple small samples directly to Earth with a small entry vehicle as with the Hayabusa rather than a single boulder to lunar orbit. Possibly a single SEP stage could propel the entire craft to Mars and then nudge the entry vehicle back to Earth.
Concur. I have suggested to Dan Mazanek at Langley that ARM is evolved into a *reusable* carrier. With three missions to the Martian moons and man tended refuelling/ maintenance missions in Lunar orbit (vide Hubble) then turned it into a blog post!
As I set out there: they might just find a boulder that derives from an impact event on the Mars surface!
“I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine.” J. B. S. Haldane
We can but hope.
This is like Zenon’s paradox about Achilles who never overtake the tortoise. New “stepping stones” on (in!) the way are being made up all the time.
Looks like that #MissionToNowhere may be going nowhere even more slowly than before.
What’s curious here is not just the ever declining ambition of the Asteroid mission, which would have been predictable, but the SPEED with which this missions goals have been reduced, and how even those reduced goals still carry even more schedule delays. We once were going to do some solar system engineering, moving an entire asteroid, albeit small, to a new orbit around the Earth/Moon system. Then we were going to retrieve just a portion of the asteroid, the big boulder. Now we are just going to do what other missions have already done and go for a flyby first!
I suspect in it’s own way this is a good sign. Information is moving very rapidly nowadays, from inside NASA to outside, including cost and schedule. I’d seen this trend since about 2000-ish, and it is a good thing. I’ve also seen where upper management, equally aware of the trend, at times acts to preempt the information being generated at all so that way there is no update to share other than some original party line.
ARM must not be getting the message in information management – but I guess some realities are too hard to control.
From the report (and wiki!) they are still considering the destinations of Osiris-Rex “Bennu” and Hayabusa2 “Ryugu” as potential mission targets. Imagine the embarrasment if they get to (341843) 2008 EV5 and find there are no suitable boulders!
Or perhaps this is a fallback position for when the whole mission gets axed. At least they will have a small probe for a few papers. :'((