Rock on! New era of space exploration is now upon us
FOR the young, space exploration feels more like science fiction than science fact.
It’s almost 50 years since Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon and nobody’s really been back there since.
In spite of all this, we should not forget that the spirit of Apollo 11 is alive and well and that new generation of scientists are about to unleash a new wave of exploration.
No less than three different designs of manned spacecraft are now under construction in the United States and at least two of these may fly before the year is out.
All over the world, the space agencies continue to launch robotic spacecraft on a regular basis.
This year, the focus will be on the asteroids.
Asteroids are huge pieces of rock left over from the beginning of our solar system. Most of them live in the vast gap that lies between the planets Mars and Jupiter.
The largest of these worlds, Ceres, could almost be classified as a miniature planet and from a distance resembles our own moon.
Smaller chunks of material never had enough internal gravity to form a round ball and some of these have a grossly irregular shape.
Fans of the Star Wars series will never forget the day Han Solo decided to fly into an asteroid belt to escape the Imperial fleet.
In the Empire Strikes back, this was a successful manoeuvre although in real life, the asteroids are millions of miles apart, so Han’s enemies would be unlikely to feel so distracted.
As far as 2018 goes, there are two separate asteroids under attack.
Both the Americans and the Japanese are out to explore strange new worlds and they don’t come much stranger than Ryugu, a diamond-shaped asteroid that is about to be studied in detail by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa 2.
Hayabusa 2 was launched three years ago and has travelled 177 million miles to reach its destination.
Its journey was powered, at least in part by an ion engine, itself the stuff of science fiction just a few years ago.
Its target, Ryugu, is barely a mile in diameter. After an extensive study above the equator, the spacecraft will attempt to land on the asteroid and retrieve a soil sample with the intention of bringing it back to the Earth.
This is the second attempt by the Japanese to retrieve material from an asteroid.
The first Hayabusa 1, was little more than a technology demonstrator that brought one gram of soil.
But with Hayabusa 2 we should see a more substantive sample.
Although the mission has yet to attract much attention, this will be the first time since Apollo that anyone has retrieved a rock or soil sample from another heavenly body and brought it safely back to Earth.
In August, a similar American mission will explore the asteroid Bennu and also try to retrieve a rock sample. Bennu is thought to consist of organic compounds and clay. So where is all this going? Well, besides the pure science side of things there has long been interest in the commercial exploitation of the asteroid belt.
A small selection of asteroids fly quite close to the Earth and these so called Near Earth Asteroids and would be relatively easy to access.
Smelting an asteroid for raw materials might sound like pie in the sky but there are already commercial organisations hell bent on exactly this strategy.
Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources are both US companies established with the specific aim of retrieving raw materials from asteroids.
They are planning robotic missions to asteroids that are believed to contain an abundance of useful raw materials.
The NASA Asteroid Redirect mission is seriously planning to change the orbit of a small asteroid and shift it into a new orbit around the moon, thus facilitating human exploration by astronauts.
If you’re starting to feel sceptical, don’t worry. Even as a life long space advocate, it’s starting to worry me.
Whenever we look at these kinds of very exciting, very daring predictions we have to be careful to distinguish between blue sky thinking and real engineering projects that might be completed in the near future.
The exact mineral composition of two asteroids should be known to us in the next few years (it will take time for these robot prospectors to fly home) and, even if the minerals sound promising, NASA and other space organisations will have to figure out a way to extract and smelt the material in the airless and gravity free environment of space.
But if they manage to pull it off, space exploration could change forever.
No longer would space agencies try to launch massive spacecraft into orbit. They would instead launch smelting plants into close proximity to a captured asteroid and use the raw materials therein to construct previously unimaginable structures in deep space.
Smelting an asteroid for raw materials might sound like pie in the sky but there are already commercial organisations hell bent on exactly this strategy