It may sound fanciful, but a Los Angeles-based company says it has conceived of a plan to fly out to a smallish, near-Earth asteroid, throw a large bag around it, and bring the body back to a “safe” gathering point near our planet.
The company, TransAstra, said Wednesday that an unnamed customer has agreed to fund a study of its proposed “New Moon” mission to capture and relocate an asteroid approximately the size of a house, with a mass of about 100 metric tons.
“We envision it becoming a base for robotic research and development on materials processing and manufacturing,” said Joel Sercel, chief executive officer of TransAstra. “Long term, instead of building space hardware on the ground and launching propellant up from the Earth, we could harvest it from raw materials in space.”
Lots of targets
Sercel said there are as many as 250 potential target asteroids, with a diameter of up to about 20 meters, that could be reached with reusable, robotic spacecraft over the next decade. He envisions aggregating dozens, and then hundreds, of small asteroids at the “New Moon” processing facility, which could potentially be located at the Earth-Sun L2 point, about 1.5 million km from Earth.
Such asteroids could provide water for use as propellant and minerals for everything from solar panels to radiation shielding. Various asteroids could be targeted for their content, such as C-type asteroids as a source of water or M-types for metals.
All of this may seem a little bit out there, and to some extent it is. That’s the point of the feasibility study, which Sercel said will be completed by May, which will further refine a mission plan and its trajectory and the spacecraft needed to fly it. If fully funded, the mission could rendezvous with an asteroid by as early as 2028 or 2029. TransAstra is working with the University of Central Florida, Purdue, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech to complete its analysis.