The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
Report from the Exploration of Near-Earth Objects Objectives Workshop
Aug. 10, 2010 | 13:14 PDT | 20:14 UTC
by Bruce Betts
This week, Jennifer Vaughn and I are representing the Planetary Society at NASA's Exploration of Near-Earth Objects (NEO) Objectives Workshop, or ExploreNOW. The meeting is being held in Washington DC. Roughly a couple hundred people from a wide range of backgrounds have been brought together at this invitation-only 2-day meeting. We are discussing the exploration of near Earth objects and asteroids, particularly future human missions to NEOs.
You can watch web streams of much of the workshop today and tomorrow. There, you can also find nearly all the presentation charts, even if you don't watch any of the web stream.
So far, there have been many overview presentations this morning. Speakers covered topics from why go to a NEO, to what the benefits would be for planetary defense and science, to results of some previous related mission and technology studies. Speakers also covered tentative plans for ways forward, including international cooperation aspects. The morning ended with an update on the Japanese Hayabusa mission, the only mission to have returned samples from a near-Earth asteroid.
So, why go to an asteroid with humans? Former astronaut and asteroid planetary scientist Tom Jones, a member of the Planetary Society's Advisory Council, gave an excellent overview of the arguments, which he broke down into 5 things: - accessibility – NEOs actually require less propulsion to get to than the surface of the Moon;
- science of our origins – asteroids preserve evidence of early solar system formation;
- human survival – these are the same objects that can impact Earth and cause widespread destruction, and human missions would provide information, such as physical properties, about the visited asteroids that would help us better understand how to deflect them;
- resources for exploration – asteroids contain materials, including some fraction of water, that could be used for further exploration; and
- stepping stones to Mars – various aspects of operations and technology can be developed and used for NEO missions that will apply to missions to Mars.
I'm of course enjoying collecting a lot of great Random Space Facts, including: asteroid Itokawa that Hayabusa visited is only a little bit more than 5 times the length of the International Space Station. I'll have more random space facts, as well as some meeting updates on Twitter @RandomSpaceFact.
Here are Itokawa and the International Space Station as it appeared in 2007, both shown at the same scale of 2 meters per pixel:
Comments
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Robots will return 10 times more science for one tenth of the cost.
Especially with what robotics will be 10 years from now.
Please don't use use science as an excuse for robot missions - anywhere. Use it as an excuse for science missions, where appropriate.
1 send robotic precurser mission with beacon
2 send precurser cargo and inflatable habs to NEO
3 use the inflatable hab for closed life support experiments and possibly animal subjets for space radiation experiments.
4 humans arrive to an existing NEO with in place infrastructure.This concept lifts the short stay constriants seen in many NEO mission proposals and doubles as a technology testbed.
Perhaps we need to look at the overall justification for a mission. If an asteroid mission is used as a stepping stone to Mars, then yes, a human component is necessary. However, if the primary mission is to learn about asteroid composition and evaluate deflection methods, the human component may be overkill.
That said, I think sending humans BEO is unwise at this point in time. Most of the problems linked to human BEO exploration can be solved by increased mission mass (radiation, micro gravity, flight times). If we focus on lowering the cost to LEO, many of these problems could be mitigated much more cost effectively. Suddenly, the whole solar system becomes financially accessible and different groups can stop bickering over destinations and use of robotics.
btw, I'm not advocating for an HLV. Strictly lower $/kg to LEO.