A team from the Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in association with NASA, is developing the capabilities necessary for a human landing on a near-Earth asteroid before 2025, a deadline set by President Obama in April of this year when he announced his new vision for the future of the American space program.
Only two missions have ever successfully landed on the surface of an asteroid. In 2005, Hayabusa, a craft developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) landed on 25143 Itokawa, whose orbit crosses with that of both Earth and Mars. Earlier in 2001, NASA’s Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission (NEAR) became the first spacecraft to orbit and successfully land on an asteroid, 433 Eros, a Mars-crosser. This craft was engineered and built by APL.
But the goal set by the President poses new challenges since both the previous missions were unmanned. In preparation for the manned landing, an initial step would be to send a robotic precursor to the surface of the asteroid to collect data, which would help determine which asteroid would be the most favorable to land on.
The schematics for this new operation, called Next Gen NEAR, was planned out under the leadership of Andrew Cheng, the chief scientist at APL. It brought together experts from the Goddard and Johnson Space Centers in Greenbelt, Md., and Houston, Texas, as well as undergraduate interns from Hopkins.
But the project will face several problems before it even begins. First, 433 Eros, which was previously landed on almost ten years ago by NEAR, is a relatively large asteroid, but its orbit does not bring it close to Earth before President Obama’s deadline. Next Gen NEAR has identified five near-Earth asteroids that could possibly suit the needs of the new mission, but all are smaller than Eros.
Second, NASA is currently facing several financial restrictions to its operations. In his announcement at the Kennedy Space Center in April, President Obama proposed a new NASA budget that would increase the agency’s spending by six billion dollars over five years, in order to fulfill his goals of reaching an asteroid by 2025 and Mars by 2030.
However, this budget proposal is stalled in Congress, as many Republicans disagreed with his new stance on NASA’s future goals, including his scrapping of the planned return to the moon proposed by former President George W. Bush. Legislators returned to Capitol Hill this week from their August recess and have only three weeks to approve a new budget before the start of the next fiscal year. If no budget is approved, NASA will have to function at or near the same amount of funding it received at the beginning of the last fiscal year.
Finally, the exact dimensions, including size, mass and density of these near-Earth asteroids are not known with certainty and collecting and analyzing data on these could hold back the project.
Under APL’s Next Gen NEAR schedule, the robotic precursor could leave Earth as early as 2014 to collect the necessary data for the manned landing.
Meanwhile a team of engineers from the Lockheed Martin Corporation have proposed a plan they termed ‘Plymouth Rock’ that could send the manned mission as soon as 2016. However, they point out that the most feasible launch date would be in 2019 when an asteroid called EA9 passes close to Earth. To minimize cost, they propose to launch the astronauts on an Orion spacecraft, the vehicles that have been built for the Constellation Program, a plan that was scrapped by Obama in his budget proposal.
The launch would involve two parts. First, an unmanned heavy-lift Orion rocket will be launched into near-Earth space. The crew members will then launch on a lighter vehicle that will dock to the Orion capsule. Then the Earth departure engines would be fired for the excursion into deep space.
Some concerns have been raised about the risk of landing humans on an asteroid including prolonged exposure to harmful radiation and cramped living quarters for extended periods of time. But all involved in the project recognize the potential in this new endeavor, which includes possibilities for commercial profit and an understanding of the risks asteroids pose to Earth.
