Tag: Planetary Society

The Planetary Society says humans orbiting Mars is important before they land on it

On Thursday night (IST), the Planetary Society announced the results of a workshop it hosted earlier this week to re-engage with the future of human spaceflight. The advocacy group concluded that humans orbiting Mars was a crucial step before humans could land on Mars.

The workshop, called “Humans Orbiting Mars”, was held with officials from the aerospace industry, scientific community and NASA in attendance. They addressed the question of whether human spaceflight to Mars by 2033 was feasible if NASA’s budget increased only by 2-3% between now and then (to keep up with inflation), and assuming the agency’s contribution to the International Space Station would end by 2024. The answer was ‘Yes’ conditional to the orbit-first-land-next strategy.

Some results from the workshop were made public by Scott Hubbard, former director of the NASA Ames Research Center, and John Logsdon, founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, in a presser. The Society’s president and popular science communicator Bill Nye also presented some tidbits, but none of them were forthcoming about the precise details of the Society’s strategy.

Hubbard said that having humans orbit Mars first before landing was important to break “this very challenging effort into smaller, more executable pieces”, differentiating it from some private sector approaches to the red planet that Logsdon said “exist but don’t seem credible”. They admitted they were conscious of the strategy’s parallels to the Apollo 8 mission, which invigorated public interest in space exploration by carrying the first humans into an orbit around the moon in 1968 and giving humanity its first view of Earthrise.

A notional timeline for the 2033 mission was presented also, with crewed test-flights in cislunar orbits being planned for 2025 and 2027. Mars missions are fixed to launch windows every 26 months to coincide with the planet’s opposition, when it comes closest to Earth. However, the launch window in 2033 provides a suitable focus year also because NASA hopes to have tested the necessary spaceflight technologies and experience through its Asteroid Retrieval Mission in the 2020s.

The Society’s space-policy writer Casey Dreier concluded on his blog:

Over the next few months, we will work to publish as much of the content presented at the workshop as we can. And later this year, we will release a report based on the discussions and feedback from this meeting formalizing our thoughts and ideas on this path forward.

However, the presser only left reporters with more questions than answers. It may have been wiser to announce all the results of the workshop alongside the report instead of releasing vague details now, even if it appears the Planetary Society has a detailed architecture of the concept in place.

And – as if to have the Society reconsider its barb about infeasible private missions to Mars – the report’s release later this year could coincide with SpaceX’s much-awaited announcement of the details of its Mars Colonial Transporter, a transport vehicle that CEO-CTO Elon Musk has promised will be very different from the Dragon and Falcon 9 rockets it currently operates. Musk is also expected to announce new spacesuit designs meeting utility requirements by the end of 2015.

Featured image credit: NASA

Spitzer has helped choose a near-Earth object the A.R.M. could bring nearer

From its perch up in space, Spitzer can use its heat-sensitive infrared vision to spy asteroids and get better estimates of their sizes.

This is what the author of a study that appeared in Astrophysical Journal Letters on June 19 said in a NASA press release about the space telescope. The Spitzer was used by a group of astronomers that authored the paper to study the dimensions and other physical properties of an asteroid named 2011 MD. They’ve found it to be suitable for NASA’s purpose, i.e. to bring a near-Earth object (NEO) into an orbit around the moon and study it – all by the 2020s. This elevation to suitability also makes 2011 MD the third such candidate NASA will consider as it ramps up the mission, dubbed the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM).

This image of asteroid 2011 MD was taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in Feb. 2014, over a period of 20 hours. The long observation, taken in infrared light, was needed to pick up the faint signature of the small asteroid (center of frame). The Spitzer observations helped narrow down the size of the space rock to roughly 20 feet (6 meters), making it one of a few candidates for NASA's proposed Asteroid Redirect Mission for which sizes are approximately known.
This image of asteroid 2011 MD was taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope in Feb. 2014, over a period of 20 hours. The long observation, taken in infrared light, was needed to pick up the faint signature of the small asteroid (center of frame). The Spitzer observations helped narrow down the size of the space rock to roughly 20 feet (6 meters), making it one of a few candidates for NASA’s proposed Asteroid Redirect Mission for which sizes are approximately known. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Northern Arizona University/SAO

Why was Spitzer used? From the release:

Prior to the Spitzer study, the size of 2011 MD was only very roughly known. It had been observed in visible light, but an asteroid’s size cannot be determined solely from visible-light measurements. In visible light alone, for example, a white snowball in space could look just as bright as a dark mountain of cosmic rock. The objects may differ in size but reflect the same amount of sunlight, appearing equally bright.

The advantage that infrared light presents, on the other hand, is that it reveals the body’s temperature, mass and density. Subsequently, the study’s authors were able to conclude that 2011 MD is lighter than asteroids usually are, and is possible two-thirds hollow. This, they think, could be because it is actually a collection of rocks or is one rock surrounded by debris. One more thing about this new candidate for ARM is its odd, oblong shape.

The team says the small asteroids probably formed as a result of collisions between larger asteroids, but they do not understand how their unusual structures could have come about. They plan to use Spitzer in the future to study more of the tiny asteroids, both as possible targets for asteroid space missions, and for a better understanding of the many asteroid denizens making up our solar system.

Knowing the size of the NEO to bring closer is important because it will help NASA plan the “how” of the mission. In another press release yesterday, the space agency said it was awarding $4.9 million to 18 proposals each of which described a method to execute the ARM, over a period of six months. NASA started accepting these proposals in March this year and reportedly received 108. Two names quickly jump out from among the proposals:

  • Deep Space Industries, which announced in January 2013 that it plans to scout for a near-Earth object, mine a small sample from it, and return that to Earth by 2016. The press release states that, through the ARM, DSI wants to “examine public-private partnership approaches”.
  • Planetary Society, which wants to put bacteria on the asteroid retrieval vehicle to “transport extremophiles through deep space and return them to Earth to test panspermia and astrobiology.”

The 2011 MD press release is available here, and the one about the proposals, here.