NASA is expecting to get $100 million next fiscal year to aid a new asteroid capture and study mission.
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. said Friday (April 5) in a news release that President Barack Obama’s proposed federal budget for the next fiscal year 2014 contains $100 million to jump start a program scientists say is the next step towards humans establishing a permanent settlement in space.
The White House will unveil its fiscal year 2014 budget around the middle of next week.
If lawmakers approve, the plan calls on NASA to launch an unmanned spacecraft as soon as 2017 on a mission to "capture" a small asteroid and drag it near the moon, possibly to a point 277,000 miles from Earth where it would then be placed in a stable orbit around the moon.
Astronauts aboard an Orion capsule will then power into space on a new monster rocket called Space Launch System (SLS), which would travel to the asteroid for mining activities, research into ways of deflecting an asteroid from striking Earth and testing to develop technology for a trip to deep space and Mars.
“This is part of what will be a much broader program,” Nelson said, during a visit in Orlando, Fla. “The plan combines the science of mining an asteroid, along with developing ways to deflect one, along with providing a place to develop ways we can go to Mars.”
As proposed, the asteroid mission would begin with research of an estimated $78 million in 2014 as a part of design work on the robotic spacecraft that would capture the asteroid. An additional $27 million would be used to begin searching the cosmos for an asteroid to grab. The ideal rock would be 20 to 30 feet in diameter and weigh 500 tons.
A similar plan was first suggested last year by space experts at the California Institute of Technology. The institute was joined in preparing a detailed feasibility study by other institutes, think tanks, laboratories and universities, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Their jointly produced Asteroid Retrieval Feasibility Study suggests that bringing a 500-ton asteroid closer to Earth would give astronauts a “unique, meaningful and affordable” destination for the next decade.
Nelson said he thinks NASA’s plan is very similar and that President Obama favors it, as the president already has announced a goal of sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025. This plan would advance that date by four years to 2021.
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