It seems that humanity will expand into the solar system. It's not clear what exactly that looks like and how difficult it might be. There are many facts attached to the prospect.
Getting everything into space from Earth is not realistic. Don't be loud, space elevator people.
One of the things that has been talked about for a long time is asteroid mining. If we want to establish a presence anywhere other than Earth, we will need resources that are already in space.
The Main Asteroid Belt has a lot of resources. Water, metals, and volatiles can be found in Near Earth Asteroids. The NEAs could be a key part of the future of space. Even though they're called Near Earth Asteroids, they aren't accessible. There is a lot of talk around asteroid mining.
In the last two decades we have learned a lot about asteroids. Congress asked NASA to catalog dangerous objects and find at least 90 percent of them by the end of 2020
Scientists have categorized asteroids into categories based on composition. Three types are C-Type, M-Type and S-Type. Each member of a family comes from the same parent body.
The sampling of asteroids is similar to prospecting here on Earth, but is more focused on science. Both NASA and JAXA have successfully launched asteroid sample return missions. The sample from NASA's OSIRIS-REx is on its way back to Earth.
We understand the composition of asteroids and will continue to catalog them. NASA took its first tentative steps in changing an asteroid's path by redirecting one with a impact. We will want to bring one closer to Earth and use its resources for our needs.
A new study suggests that asteroids can be shifted around and moved into a more favorable position. A multiple-vehicle strategy for near- Earth asteroid capture is the title of a journal article. Livia Ionescu is from the James Watt School of Engineering.
The study shows how two separate spaceships can work together to move an asteroid close to Earth. One of the spaceships is a pitcher and the other is a catcher. The pitcher and catcher spaceships act together as a pair, where the pitcher spaceship hops from asteroid to asteroid and the catcher spaceship is stationed at the Earth.
The authors compared their two-spacecraft proposal to other methods in their paper. They say that their method is better.
Round trips are not one of the strengths of the proposal. The pitcher doesn't have to come back to Earth. Each asteroid could be hit by a single pitcher spaceship. The pitcher was able to move for the next nudging.
The team found that their dual-spacecraft method is better. The results show that the two-spacecraft strategy is capable of returning more asteroid mass. It isn't that easy.
The team looked at their proposal in a number of ways. They analyzed a set of fictional asteroids to create a large data set and analyzed some real asteroids as mission targets.
The team compared single-spacecraft missions with two-spacecraft missions. Delta V is a measure of how fast an object can be moved. The amount of mass returned is the most important aspect of the issue.
Their method uses more Delta V than single-spacecraft methods. Their method returns more mass than single-spacecraft methods because the pitcher doesn't come back to Earth. The asteroid is placed in Earth's heliocentrism.
The two-spacecraft strategy does not impact the required Delta V in a beneficial way according to the paper. The goal of an asteroid capture mission is to get useful mass to the vicinity of the Earth.
The results are based on asteroids that have the same mass and are easy to navigate. The team dug deeper because that isn't realistic.
The analysis looked at NEAs with realistic elements. The orbital elements of the asteroids will be randomly generated in order to generate statistical data on the relative performance of the one-spacecraft and two-spacecraft strategies.
The mission architectures are still the same. In the single-spacecraft model, the spaceship goes to an asteroid, then goes to the next one. The pitcher moves from asteroid to asteroid while the catcher stays on Earth. In their analysis, each mission visits the same asteroid in the same order, but in actual mission planning, that may not be the case.
There was a correlation in the scenario. Lower mass was produced by higher?V.
Thousands of simulations were run by the team The axes of the asteroids are important in simulations. The lower the returned mass is, the closer the semi-major axis is.
There is a lot of detail in the paper. It shows that the two-spacecraft mission has benefits. When asteroids are brought to Earth's heliocentrism, that's all.
It might not be necessary to bring asteroids close to Earth. It is possible that Mars is a better place.
The authors acknowledge that if two spaceships need to be developed, designed, and built, it increases mission complexity. Increased complexity causes costs to go up. The advantages of the two-spacecraft strategy are a higher amount of retrieved mass and a shorter mission duration. There is a chance of an increase in revenue.
The benefits will depend on individual missions and the asteroid's mass. The two-spacecraft has the potential to deliver a higher mass within a lower amount of time, but it still remains dependent on the targeted asteroids and launch date.
The two-spacecraft advantage was obvious when the team looked at three different asteroid missions. The two-spacecraft strategy is able to return 1.5 times its initial mass, while the one-spacecraft strategy is only capable of bringing less than its initial mass.
The authors don't give a lot of thought to their results. It is possible for more than one pitcher to serve a single catcher. The two missions are more complex than the single mission because they have to be coordinated. Adding more pitchers would only make the problem worse.
steroid mining is a long way off in the future. We're building a more accurate and complete catalogue of asteroids, we're bringing asteroid samples back to Earth for analysis, and we're testing impactors on asteroids.
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