NASA is well on it’s way to an “Armageddon”-style mission to an asteroid, but it is leaving behind Bruce Willis and the nuclear bombs.
The space brainiacs are investigating the deployment of a robotic spacecraft to capture an asteroid and drag it into orbit around the moon, according to NewScientist.com.
From the orbiting space rock, NASA could stage practice landing missions to the moon, study the use of asteroids in the production of spacecraft and fuel for spaceships and expose astronauts to long-term radiation beyond Earth’s protective magnetic field.
The details of the planned mission aren’t fully hashed out yet, but the Keck Institute for Space Studies at Caltech say that the mission would cost roughly $2.6 billion, only slightly more than NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover.
The key component of the mission would be a solar-powered spacecraft that would propel itself near a small asteroid, probably one about 20 feet wide.
Once it was close to the asteroid, the spacecraft would catch the rock in a gigantic 30-by-45-foot bag and drag it into orbit around the moon.
All told, it would take the spacecraft six to 10 years to complete the mission.
But netting an asteroid is not the be all and end all of the mission. In fact, the asteroid’s orbit would be the first major step towards sending astronauts to places like Mars.
If an asteroid were to be pulled into orbit around the moon, it would be put in the sweet spot where the gravitational pull from the Earth was cancelled out by the gravitational pull from the moon.
That place, called the Earth-moon Lagrange point 2, would be farther from Earth than any astronaut has ever gone and is not shielded from radiation by Earth’s magnetic field.
Additionally, and importantly, any spacecraft or space station that reached that place wouldn’t need to burn fuel in order to maintain orbit.
It is thus a perfect place to see how the human mind and body would fare in a deep space mission, like one to a far off asteroid or to a planet like Mars.