§ 8.3.10 Other Efforts
- LunaCorp in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute is developing a robotic probe to travel across the lunar surface before the year 2000, including a prototype which was tested in a 200 km journey across the Atacama Desert in Chile in 1997. While this is not a space industrialization project, it may bring a little publicity to the above projects and PERMANENT concepts.
- NEAR - Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission - a NASA mission to study the Near Earth Asteroids 433 Eros and 253 Mathilde, launched in February 1996. It flew past asteroid 253 Mathilde on June 27, 1997, flew past Earth on January 22, 1998 (for a gravity assist and course correction), then will rendezvous with asteroid 433 Eros in January 1999, where it will go into orbit around Eros and study the asteroid for a year. (There will be no surface landing or interaction.) This page has links to other NEAR pages, and a little bit of asteroid information. Compliments of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC).
- Clementine 2, a joint venture between the U.S. Air Force Space Warfare Center, Phillips Laboratory and NASA, is intended to rendezvous with a number of near-Earth asteroids and characterize each via probe impact. Little information has been forthcoming on this project, but it is being funded. (paper ref.) Targets being considered include asteroids 1987 OA, 1989 UR, and 1991 JX. Objectives include analyzing the dynamic strength of surface material, crater formation, dust cloud composition, stratification, thermal properties, and of course spectral data for composition and mechanical properties. See also the now famous past probe Clementine 1. You're encouraged to politically support Clementine 2 in any appropriate way you can.
Some notes on flight ready hardware:
- When a probe goes into production, it's not a bad idea to consider having the designers produce some extra copies at the same time, which reduces the cost per copy. Extra copies of probes are less expensive than the first copy, due to design costs, as long as you order it before the manufacturers scrap their production line.
- REGA (Regolith Evolved Gas Analyzer) (paper ref.) is a flight instrument under development at the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) for flying on probes to measure volatiles in samples of regolith "[f]or bodies such as the Moon or asteroids". It consists of a small programmable furnace which can measure volatiles released at different temperatures, a supply of reactant gas, and a quadrupole trap mass spectrometer. It is a small instrument (15 x 20 x 27 cm - less than 0.03 cubic meters) with a mass less than 5 kg, requiring only 50 watts of power. The soil sample size is 1 gram, and maximum oven temperature is 900 C. It is covered in Chapter 1.
- Space Engineering Research Center (SERC) at the University of Arizona has produced a little laboratory electrolysis plant to produce oxygen from solids, and is progressing towards a space qualified design. "This unit, called MOXCE, is capable of producing 0.1 kg of Oxygen per hour and has proven extremely rugged. At this time a second generation plant, called MOXCE2, is under development."
- An interesting paper was presented at the 1993 Princeton Conference entitled "Early Lunar Access" (paper ref.) on using existing transportation systems to return crews to the Moon before the end of the century for starting a permanent, expandable lunar outpost, using the Space Shuttle, or the Titan IV or Ariane V with the Centaur upper stage to launch the mission. The author, Paul H. Bialla of the General Dynamics Space Systems Division in San Diego, California, showed that the only significantly new development is a lunar excursion vehicle, which itself is a derivative of an Apollo module. Since the majority of the transportation infrastructure already exists, his approach is low risk and low cost.
Since it takes significantly less fuel to go to an asteroid near Earth, we could pack more life support supplies and send people to an asteroid to start materials retrieval infrastructure.
- Another paper on how we can use present day launch vehicles, and/or slight modifications of them (e.g., the Shuttle booster but removing the returnable Shuttle and putting on a nonreturnable payload bay), to return to the moon or start to retrieve asteroidal resources, is by Andrew Petro of NASA JSC. (Paper reference)
- You can get a comparison of costs for Earth launch by present and planned launchers at http://www.rocketplane.com/comp.htm.
- Also of interest is the possibility of using Cold-War nuclear missiles, both US and Russian, to launch peaceful payloads instead, i.e., take off the nuclear warhead and put on supplies for a mission to an asteroid near Earth. Some Russian rockets are already converted ICBMs.
If I have missed any plans or concepts, please send e-mail to . I know I've also missed a lot of flight ready hardware, and would appreciate inputs on that, too.
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