NASA's NEO Detection Mission
NASA Request for Information for a Mission of Opportunity to Aid in the Detection of Very-Near Earth Asteroids
“NASA HEOMD and SMD, through the Joint Robotic Precursor Activity (JRPA) office, are interested in instrument concepts for a mission of opportunity to be hosted on a US Government or commercial spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit that will be capable of detecting and tracking asteroids in orbits very similar to Earth’s, including Earth-trojan asteroids. “Very-Near Earth asteroids” are envisioned as a set of asteroids to be discovered, in an orbit very similar to Earth’s, that offer low delta-V solutions for human exploration missions. This RFI solicits information from potential sources for an instrument that can be delivered for flight as soon as 2016.”
Going “Commercial” is the way this should be handled.I don’t believe the average person would see the usefulness of such a mission to spend their taxes on. Besides this should’ve been done years ago.
I believe that going “Commercial” is the right way here. The average person is unable to reason the use of such a mission through taxpayer funds. Its either commercialization or through the “Black projects” of the DOD.
Piggybacking an astronomical sensor on a planned GEO satellite is a reasonable strategy. However I am not clear on the evidence that such objects exist.
Maybe they shoud look into combining this instrument with the Planetary Resources small-sats and the Near venus orbiter proposed in the ‘Sentinel’ spacecraft. – DUH! Or do NASA centers not coordinate…. oh yeah, they dont.
It seems like a big telecom satellite in GEO is a much better fit for this instrument than either the small proposed Planetary Resources telescopes or a Venus orbiter. Also, big satellites are regularly placed in GEO, so it’s a safer bet to assume it will be on one of those rather than a proposed PR satellite or Venus orbiter, either of which might never get built.
The point was that most of the missions I mention above are already funded (to some extent) and have very similar mission requirements. If they were to pool resources (finance), the technology is almost trivial. ( at least done before).
The viewpoint of the Venus orbit-trailing spacecraft is better for identifying Earth-Trojan asteroids than GEO.
Yes, that is what I have heard; to see a small asteroid you have to be closer to the sun than it is so you can see the sunlit disk against a dark background.
I also wonder if the same technique they use to discover exo-planets would work. If maybe some of the satellites and probes studying the sun could be instrumented to catch small objects by the light they block.
Ball proposed exactly such a mission. Using a spacecraft almost exactly like Kepler it would detect asteroids and objects in nthe kuiper bellt using the occultation method and background stars.
This would be a good fit for a commercial comm-sat. You mount the instrument to stare out the back of the S/C, and you scan the entire sky every 24 hours. You get one transponder channel for data, which means that you have about 155 Mbps for the data rate. And best of all, these S/C have lots of extra power for the first 8 or 10 years, because they need the extra solar arrays to cover the natural degradation of the solar arrays over the 15 years of the S/C life.