This makes me wonder how long until they try to capture a comet or asteroid by deceleration and bring it back to earth. It would be an incredible feat.
Yeah NASA's proposed an asteroid capture mission (comet would be really difficult, super expensive, or take a super long time) for a near Earth orbit asteroid, but they'd park it around the moon.. that way if you make a mistake you don't take out a city
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Yeah NASA's proposed an asteroid capture mission (comet would be really difficult, super expensive, or take a super long time) for a near Earth orbit asteroid, but they'd park it around the moon.. that way if you make a mistake you don't take out a city
That's fantastic and a great way to get conspiracy nuts thinking the Government is weaponizing asteroids.
Wow, the comet is just outside Mars Orbit and this mission still took 10 years! Amazing how they coordinate all of this.
If Kerbal Space Program has taught me anything, it is that it is easy to zip past a chunk of rock travelling in orbit, but a whole new level of complicated and time consuming to get something to land on that rock without creating a whole new crater....poor Jebediah....
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Was it always planned for Rosetta to fly by those two asteroids? Because that seems pretty impressive to account for those two as well. I mean the formula is great and all, but even in the vacuum of space, seems like it would be tons of variables to account for to get all those gravity assists and the fly-bys right.
What sort of manoeuvrability does this thing have anyway?
Edit - Got some answers from this ELI5 video here lol:
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Last edited by Teh_Bandwagoner; 08-06-2014 at 01:43 PM.
The figure is barely half the price of a modern submarine, or three Airbus 380 jumbo jets, and covers a period of almost 20 years, from the start of the project in 1996 through the end of the mission in 2015.
I can't believe how many billions we spend on creative and inventive ways of killing each other instead of spending it on cool pictures like this... there's always that bonus "science" throw in too.
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I can't believe that it's almost cheaper to land a spacecraft on an asteroid than build a ring road around the city....
And how much faster the spacecraft reaches the asteroid than the road gets completed :P
So what do we get out of this? Landing on it? And how big is this thing?
__________________ "In brightest day, in blackest night / No evil shall escape my sight / Let those who worship evil's might / Beware my power, Green Lantern's light!"
