NASA’s bold mission to capture an asteroid is expensive, but it will contribute to achieving the agency’s ultimate goal of sending a man to Mars, an eminent researcher asserts.
For the past 18 months, NASA has been working on a plan to send a whole asteroid passing near Earth, or a boulder, torn from a large space rock, to a lunar orbit using a robotic probe. The astronauts sent aboard the Orion capsule, ideally by 2025, can visit the captured asteroid. NASA officials say the Asteroid Redirect Mission or Asteroid Mission will help develop the technology and know-how required to send astronauts to Mars, which the space agency plans to complete by the mid-2030s.
But Richard Binzel, a professor of planetology, aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a different point of view. ARM doesn't make any sense, he says. “The main reason why ARM doesn’t make any sense is that this is a wrong step on the way to Mars,” said Binzel. "There is nothing in common with sending a man to Mars and capturing an asteroid in a bag. These multibillion-dollar expenses have nothing to do with sending a man to Mars." Binzel laid out his reasoning in an article published October 29 in the journal Nature. "Operations for capturing, maintaining and redirecting an asteroid are dead ends for a long space travel," he writes.
NASA should abandon ARM, says Binzel, and create a “Grand Challenge Mission” scheme, which will select offers on a competitive basis. In the same way, the New Frontiers program was selected, which sends automatic probes exploring the solar system for less than $ 800 million apiece.
