| Nighthawk117 said: What? Where did you get this? The mission your taking about, asteroid retrievel, is only being studied. It would cost at least $2.5 billion to try to pull it off. The only asteroid mission currently being readied is Osiris Rex. On that mission, a robotic spacecraft is due to launch in 2016 on an Atlas 5 rocket. After a year or so in space, it will rendevous with an asteroid, take a sample of it, and return that sample to Earth years later. Also, if the asteroid retrieval mission is ever approved and succeeds, it will only capture a roughly 500' diameter asteroid and place it into orbit around the Moon. It would be impossible to walk on such a small rock - it would have zero gravity. Hell, even the Moon, as big as it is, only has 1/6 of Earth's gravity. |
"NASA plans to launch an ARM robotic spacecraft to rendezvous with, capture and redirect an asteroid mass near the end of this decade. The spacecraft will redirect it to a stable orbit around the moon called a "Distant Retrograde Orbit." Astronauts aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft, launched from a Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, will explore the asteroid in the mid-2020s."
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/IAC-14-A5_1_1-Gates.pdf
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