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NASA has pressed the “Go” button for its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM).
During July, the project went through “Key Decision Point-B”, and it got the tick from management on August 15, meaning the agency is going to get busy on a “baseline mission design”.
The plan, as we [The Register] reported in March 2015, is to rendezvous with a suitable near-Earth asteroid; chip off a chunk to bring back to Earth; and nudge the asteroid into Lunar orbit.
With the bureaucracy out of the way, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory says it's going to issue a request for proposals (RFP) for the spacecraft. There will also be an approach to market for third-party payloads on the robotic flight system.
NASA's cost cap for the project has been lifted from US$1.25 billion to $1.4 billion, something the agency says is entirely due to a one-year delay in launch scheduling, with the robotic ARM now slated to fly in December 2021 (a crewed launch is also on the cards for 2026, but that part of the project is in a much earlier stage of planning).
More from NASA here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18 2016, @07:46AM
IIRC, the propulsion here will be an ion drive. What I wonder is whether they thought about propulsing materials taken from the asteroid itself, rather than bringing fuel along. That would be a rather essential piece of tech to develop, one should think.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday August 18 2016, @08:37AM
It would be a good idea to test it, but not to rely on it.
Maybe they should bring the rock into Lunar orbit, then use it to carry out separate "space ice as fuel" test from there at a later date.