Posts tagged Asteroid

A start-up with high-profile backers on Tuesday unveiled its plan to send robotic spacecraft to remotely mine asteroids, a hyper-ambitious effort aimed at opening up a new frontier in space exploration.

At an event at the Seattle Museum of Flight, a group that includes former officials from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration unveiled Planetary Resources Inc. and said it is developing a “low cost” series of spacecraft to prospect and mine “near earth” asteroids for water and metals, thus bringing “the natural resources of space within humanity’s economic sphere of influence.”

The solar system is “full of resources and we can bring that back to humanity,” said Planetary co-founder Peter Diamandis, who helped start the X-Prize competition to spur nongovernmental space flight. The company said it expects to launch its first spacecraft to low-earth orbit—between 100 and 1,000 miles above the earth’s surface—within two years, in what would be a prelude to sending spacecraft to prospect and mine asteroids.

Planetary Resources didn’t immediately say how much money it has raised, how much money it would need, or whether it already has viable technology to prospect and mine an asteroid.

(Source: futurenow321)

One way or another, it’s on everyone’s minds, living somewhere in the back of our collective consciousness. Hollywood knows it, and continues to plumb it for box office numbers. Sci-fi is rife with it. The fossil record shouts warnings across millennia about it. Even the dinosaurs developed a particular, albeit brief, loathing for it. The killer asteroid—the one that we might never even see coming—could end life on this planet and there would be nothing humans could do about it. It creates a kind of helplessness that’s difficult to even think about, and it’s Robert Weaver’s job to think about it all the time.

Weaver, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), doesn’t hunt for killer asteroids, but he does study the ways humans might use their vast nuclear arsenals—designed to wipe each other off the face of the planet—to save the whole of humanity from a catastrophic asteroid impact. Weaver has been running simulations on LANL’s Cielo supercomputer to determine humanity’s capacity to mitigate an impending asteroid threat using a one-megaton nuclear energy source—one roughly 50 times more powerful than the blasts inflicted upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of World War II.

(Source: futurenow321)