NASA is currently training astronauts to land on asteroids and hopes to send humans to one of the distant space rocks in about a decade, The Telegraph reported over the weekend. As in the movie Armageddon, one motivation for the endeavor is to figure out a way to destroy or deflect a large asteroid that could be on a collision course with Earth.
In June, a group of astronauts will begin learning how to operate vehicles and move about on asteroids, according to the U.K. newspaper, which interviewed a British astronaut who is participating in the training program.
Major Tim Peake, an astronaut with the European Space Agency, told The Telegraph that a manned mission to intercept an incoming asteroid would be a last resort but could prove necessary because even large space objects can be difficult to detect.
"With enough warning we would probably send a robotic mission to deflect an asteroid, but if something is spotted late and is big enough we might come into Armageddon type scenarios where we may have to look at manned missions to deflect it," the ESA astronaut was quoted as saying.
Peake, formerly a test helicopter pilot, told the newspaper that "an asteroid mission of up to a year is definitely achievable" with technology that's currently available or being developed.
Asteroids are primarily located in a belt beyond the orbit of Mars, but some "near-Earth" objects swing much closer to our planet—sometimes even within 100,000 miles or closer, obviously, when they strike us. Still, The Telegraph noted that a mission to visit an asteroid would likely take space explorers much further from Earth than the 239,000 miles traversed by NASA's Apollo astronauts when they visited the Moon.
Aside from getting about safely on the near-zero gravity conditions on an asteroid, landing on such small, fast-moving objects could prove thorny.
NASA is scheduled to officially announce details of its plan to land astronauts on an asteroid at the Japan Geoscience Union Meeting later this month, The Telegraph reported. The U.S. space agency reportedly hopes to send a robot probe to an asteroid by 2016 and begin sending manned missions to them beginning in the late 2020s.
The presentation in Japan reportedly details a manned mission that would "rendezvous with an asteroid up to three million miles from the Earth, taking around a year to make the entire round trip." The astronauts aboard that mission might stay on the asteroid for as long as month.
A group led by commercial spaceflight pioneers Eric Anderson and Peter Diamandis recently formed a company, Planetary Resources, which will also attempt to visit asteroids by the end of the decade. Planetary Resources said last month that it planned to send robotic spacecraft to near-Earth asteroids to mine water and metals, which along with exploration and planetary safety could also be an objective of the NASA project.
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