SAN FRANCISCO
The US space agency is developing a method to capture asteroids for study that could be used to stop ones threatening Earth in the future, NASA’s chief said Tuesday.
At the Humans to Mars conference in Washington, Charles Bolden discussed the possibility of a Hollywood-style plan for saving the planet from a potentially catastrophic space object.
The White House has tasked NASA with “capturing” an asteroid and bringing it into Earth’s orbit for observation. NASA’s wants to complete the undertaking by 2025 for research leading up to a manned mission to Mars the following decade.
But the project may have other long-term benefits.
“If we can do that and we get it into stable lunar orbit,” Bolden said of a hypothetical asteroid, “we will have done something that is dramatically informative to humanity and may lead to the development of sustainable technologies that will then be able to save the planet.”
NASA's plan is to push a very small asteroid, no more than 13 feet (4 meters) in diameter, into the moon’s orbit using an unmanned probe. Once in orbit, the agency can send astronauts and other probes to study it.
While Bolden claimed he didn't think we would need to stop a rogue asteroid in our lifetimes, he had very high praise for the initiative.
“We are going to inform those who follow us, after we demonstrate through the asteroid redirect mission, that you can, in fact, do something that many people did not think was possible,” he said. “You can, in fact, move something that is God-made and headed around the sun, and you can deflect that ever so slightly.”
The project is perhaps less thrilling than an action film, but could still potentially save the world.
