NASA's Boulder Retrieval Mission is Doomed
Asteroid Redirect Mission Delayed One Year, Space Policy Online
“President Obama’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) will not meet the 2025 date he set for the program in 2010. ARM Program Director Michele Gates told a NASA Advisory Council (NAC) committee on March 2 that launch of the robotic portion of the mission is now expected in 2021 and the crew portion in 2026. Both are one year slips from earlier projected dates. President Obama announced on April 15, 2010 that the next destination for human space exploration will be sending astronauts to an asteroid as a step to eventually sending them to Mars. The mission has evolved since then. The current concept calls for a robotic spacecraft to be sent to an asteroid where it will pick up a boulder from its surface and move the boulder to an orbit around the Moon. Astronauts aboard an Orion spacecraft will examine the boulder and retrieve a sample for return to Earth.”
Keith’s note: ARM will be cancelled by the next Administration regardless of who wins the election. Congress is already on the record as being against it. NASA will not complain about the cancellation since they never really liked it to begin with. More road kill on the #JourneyToMars, y’all.
– Asteroid Boulder Retrieval Mission Needs a Precursor Mission, earlier post
– Asteroid Boulder Retrieval Mission Starts To Drift Away, earlier post
– Earlier posts on Bolden and asteroids, earlier post
Bummer. I don’t suppose we could salvage part of the robotic mission and just have it do a larger-than-usual sample return mission?
Even sample return is not as critical as it once was as in situ instruments have improved, but the best target for a simple return mission would likely be Phobos. Many small samples would provide more information than one large one. The samples could as Hyabusa demonstrated be returned directly to earth.
I’m not sure about the in situ instruments. They have improved, but there is a lot to be said for size. With several meters to play with, you can make a vastly better mass spectrometry than anything you can fit on an unmanned spacecraft. And being able to kick it when it isn’t working is also an advantage.
But I completely agree about needing many, small samples, rather than one big one. Maybe some people don’t get outside enough, but looking at the closest planet, I see a tremendous amount of diversity. I’m currently having lunch at a place about a 20 minute walk from my office. On the way, I could easily pick up a dozen, very different rock and soil samples. Lab analysis is at the point where you don’t need kilograms for one sample. But unless you think all the rocks on a given planet are the same, you do want multiple samples.
I agree that instruments can be more capable if more mass and energy is available. But they do not necessarily require an earth-based lab or a human crew. An unmanned spacecraft can be as large as needed, although with greater mass it will take longer to reach its destination. With solar-electric (or if the money were available, nuclear-electric) propulsion, a robotic vehicle significantly larger than Curiosity could reach Phobos in a reasonable time. Alternatively sample return from Phobos would require much less energy than from Mars, so a Phobos mission might find sample return more advantageous than a Mars surface mission.
Instruments on probes are limited not only by mass, volume, power, and etc. constraints imposed by the lander, but by speculation about which instruments scientists think they need. The problem is obvious. The results returned by the (limited) number of instruments on a probe will spawn new tests which should be performed. But, those tests would most likely require new instruments to be flown.
The turn-around time and high cost for putting such instruments on another probe and launching it to the same location are both high. On top of that, there would be resistance to landing another probe in the same location since other scientists would want to explore other areas of the body or even other bodies in the solar system.
So, the chances of another probe containing the correct new instruments landing in the same area are astonishingly small. So, it’s much better to return a sample to an earth bound lab, so that a virtually unlimited number of tests can be run using any and all equipment that is in the lab, or can be procured for the lab.
FWIW, a lot of people forget that the reason for the NEO encounter mission was to provide a mid-duration mission to bridge thegap between the Moon and Phobos. Finding a NEO with a lower delta-v requirement that the Martian System and was larger than the expected size of the spacecraft proved unexpectedly problematic.
This problem was compounded by an attempt to hide that the whole mission had no real purpose other than giving NASA deep space experience. An entirely spurious attempt was made to link the NEO encounter mission with planetary defence. This led inevitabily to it mutating into ARM, which meets the planetary defence objective far more cheaply and efficiently. This actually guaranteed that it would stop meeting NASA’s real objective: a long-duration deep space mission to stress-test crews, procedures and technologies. With that, it’s cancellation became inevitable.
Testing the Deep Space Habitat in the EML-1 or -2 halo is a better idea anyway.
Obama’s space policy plan that introduced the mission to an asteroid prior to going to Mars also included a robotic precursors program that was slated to have a NEO mapping telescope mission that would enlarge the candidate pool from which a later mission destination would be selected. This was zeroed out when SLS was instigated. The SLS/Orion plan also wiped out the technology development program for an asteroid/Mars oriented interplanetary spacecraft for human missions and they together consumed the available budget space for the near future, restricting the budget from which expansive mission development and missions could be funded to minimal levels, greatly inhibiting the scope of exploration. SLS and Orion are what killed the original scoped asteroid mission in the 2020s; they ate the budget.
ARM is different from the original asteroid plan and came along later after SLS was put in place as its own proposal for a modest mission to capture an asteroid, fitting in the circumstance of the time, which was then selected by the administration for a few reasons. It was technically a human asteroid mission and superficially fulfilled that Presidential mandate and it could be oriented around SLS and Orion and contribute some mission activity. It could conceivably fit in the much smaller budget space available for missions in the 2020s. It was also a testbed and stepping stone for solar electric propulsion technology that conceptually they wanted for a later human Mars missions; one of the wiped out technology flagship programs from Obama’s original plan was a SEP demo vehicle roughly identical to the ARM spacecraft, which incidentally would have already flown by now had the original plan gone through. It was basically one of the exploration tech demos with a human mission wrapped around it. So it was some effort that could be done in the meantime that helped the later Mars oriented program which was thematically similar to what they originally intended. Linking ARM to planetary defense occurred later as a perk of the mission.
There is something to be said for gaining experience simply for the sake of gaining experience. You don’t hear people talk about the Apollo 9 and 10 missions, but Apollo 11 would not have happened without them. The problem with ARM is that there is no clear path from the experience gained to, er…, whatever it is NASA would do next. So it needs some invented justification. They didn’t invent a good one, however.
So, it was going to take NASA 15 years to do a mission? Sounds doomed from the start. Any other NASA missions in the same boat?
Cheers
Perfect time to setup programs to address the Asteroid Grand Challenge –to detect, track, characterize all asteroids that will lead to mitigation and/or ISRU. Adapt EP to become a L2 to Mars/Asteroid reuseable tug rather than from LEO. Plan to send crew to asteroid(s) with the proper equipment geared toward long term demonstration of space travel.
Well, that’s OK… since we’re going to have to adapt our physiology to tolerate perchlorate in the Martian soil.
A few years delay is a feature, not a bug.
ARM is the child of a mission that asks why the SLS/Orion emperor has no clothes.
The road to Mars runs in circles and Washington D.C. is at the center of that circle.
“ARM will be cancelled by the next Administration regardless of who wins the election.”
Of course it will. It’s been perfectly obvious that ARM was never anything more than the Administration Replacement Moratorium. With just 9 months left for the present team, ARM has served its purpose.
I’d argue that a planetary defense mission (and associated technologies like electric ion thrusters) is a much better use of NASA funds than a dead-end manned Mars mission that will never meet its goal – to find evidence of life on Mars. More at contraryfindings.com.