A note from NASA: As follow-up to the Asteroid Initiative Request for Information, please hold September 30-October 2 for a technical workshop at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, to discuss both the Asteroid Redirect Mission and the Grand Challenge. Virtual participation options will be available during the workshop, so please mark your calendar even if you aren’t able to travel to Houston during that time. Further details […]
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“asteroid retrieval mission”
Crowd sourcing.
It has become ubiquitous in today’s wired world.
Kickstarter campaigns are run for everything from funding trips to building asteroid hunting telescopes. Need a design for something? Describe your project, have designers put forth their best efforts, and purchase the one you like the best.
Now crowd sourcing has come to NASA. And the space agency is doing it for the boldest human spaceflight initiative since Apollo program sent men to the moon more than 40 years ago.
Like House Republicans, Archie and Edith Bunker yearned for an earlier, simpler era that never really existed. Well, Archie more than Edith. And, at least he was very funny. Congress…not so much. (Credit: CBS Television)
“Boy the way Beatles played
Songs from Sgt. Pepper’s parade.
Guys like us we had it made,
Those were the days….”
By Douglas Messier
Parabolic Arc Managing Editor
In this edition of “Palazzopalooza: We’ll Bamboozle Ya!,” we look at how the House’s nostalgia for the past is preventing it from dealing with the realities of the present.
Today’s conservative Republicans are by far the most nostalgic of Americans. They yearn for a earlier, simpler time when America was a far more perfect union. Unfortunately, their visions are often rather selective, ignoring unpleasant realities of the past and the limitations of the present day.
This is, sadly, what we see in the NASA budget the House passed last week. Just how far in the past are Congressmen living? Decades.
Aviation Week reports that European space officials will spend the summer reviewing the prospects of NASA’s asteroid retrieval mission even as the proposal struggles to gain support in Congress: Jean Jacques Dordain, director general of the European Space Agency (ESA), told Bolden he has set up a multi-agency working group headed by ESA human-spaceflight chief Thomas Reiter “tasked to elaborate a coherent approach with regard to your new initiative.” Representatives […]
WASHINGTON (NASA PR) — Deputy Administrator Lori Garver and other senior NASA officials will discuss the progress being made on NASA’s mission to capture, redirect, and explore an asteroid June 18. The event will be webcast live at: https://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-hq Officials will also outline engagement opportunities for industry, international partners and the general public at the event, which will take place from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. EDT in the James […]
This artist’s concept from 1978 shows an asteroid retrieval mission. (NASA)
By Michelle K. Dailey
NASA History Office Program
Within NASA’s new FY2014 budget proposal lies a project known as the Asteroid Retrieval and Utilization Mission. This project would be the first to capture a small near-Earth asteroid and safely redirect it to a lunar orbit so that astronauts can visit and explore it. Such a mission would expand scientific knowledge of the origins of both humanity and the universe.
Illustration of an asteroid retrieval spacecraft in the process of capturing a 7-m, 500-ton asteroid. (Image Credit: Rick Sternbach / KISS)
Here’s something interesting: the Keck Institute for Space Studies has continued work on the Asteroid Return Mission Study that it published last April. The report is the basis of a new NASA plan to return an asteroid near Earth and send a human crew to explore it.
NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver addresses the Planetary Defense Conference in Flagstaff on April, 15, 2013. (Credit: Eric Dahlstrom)
By Douglas Messier
Parabolic Arc Managing Editor
NASA will partner with private organizations seeking to catalog and mine asteroids as the space agency undertakes an ambitious effort to retrieve one of these bodies and send astronauts to explore it, Deputy Administrator Lori Garver told planetary scientists on Monday.
“When Planetary Resources was founded a few month ago and following on that Deep Space Industries, I could not have been happier,” Garver said, referring to two asteroid mining companies announced last year. “It’s proving our focus of attention on areas where there is not just U.S. government interest.”