NASA's bold plan to drag an asteroid into orbit around the moon may sound like science fiction, but it's achievable with current technology, experts say.

President Barack Obama's 2014 federal budget request, which will be unveiled today (April 10), likely includes about $100 million for NASA to jump-start an asteroid-capture mission, U.S. Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) said last week.

The plan aims to place a roughly 23-foot-wide (7 meters) space rock into a stable lunar orbit, where astronauts could begin visiting it as soon as 2021 using NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule, Nelson said.

While challenging, the mission is definitely doable, said Chris Lewicki, president and chief engineer of billionaire-backed asteroid-mining firm Planetary Resources. [NASA's Asteroid-Capture Plan (Video)]

"Return of a near-Earth asteroid of this size would require todays largest launch vehicles and todays most efficient propulsion systems in order to achieve the mission," Lewicki, who served as flight director for NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers and surface mission manager for the agency's Phoenix Mars lander, wrote in a blog post Sunday (April 7).

"Even so, capturing and transporting a small asteroid should be a fairly straightforward affair," Lewicki added. "Mission cost and complexity are likely on par with missions like the [$2.5 billion] Curiosity Mars rover."

Spurring solar system exploration

NASA's idea is similar to one proposed last year by scientists based at Caltech's Keck Institute for Space Studies in Pasadena.

The Keck study estimated that a robotic spacecraft could drag a 23-foot near-Earth asteroid (NEA) which would likely weigh about 500 tons into a high lunar orbit for $2.6 billion. The returns on this initial investment are potentially huge, the researchers said.

"Experience gained via human expeditions to the small returned NEA would transfer directly to follow-on international expeditions beyond the Earth-moon system: to other near-Earth asteroids, [the Mars moons] Phobos and Deimos, Mars and potentially someday to the main asteroid belt," the Keck team wrote in a feasibility study of their plan.

See more here:

Capturing an Asteroid: How NASA Could Do It

NASA's newly unveiled asteroid-capture plan is still in its early stages, but some details are already emerging about how the audacious mission might work.

President Barack Obama's 2014 federal budget request, which was released Wednesday (April 10), gives NASA $105 million to jump-start a program that would snag an asteroid and park it near the moon. Astronauts would then visit the space rock using the agency's Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule, perhaps as early as 2021.

"This mission represents an unprecedented technological feat that will lead to new scientific discoveries and technological capabilities and help protect our home planet," NASA chief Charles Bolden said in a statement. [NASA's Asteroid-Capture Mission: How It Works (Images)]

The space agency is still working out how exactly to pull off the mission, which officials are calling the "Asteroid Initiative" or "Asteroid Retrieval and Utilization Mission" at the moment. But a few things are already clear.

For starters, the probe that will chase down and capture the 25-foot (8 meters) or so asteroid will be unmanned. And it will be powered by solar electric propulsion, which generates thrust by accelerating charged particles called ions.

Ion thrusters have been used on other NASA probes, including Dawn, which recently spent a year orbiting the huge asteroid Vesta before departing for the dwarf planet Ceres. But engineers will need to develop an advanced version for the Asteroid Initiative craft, since it will be towing a 500-ton space rock over millions of miles.

"This mission accelerates our technology development activities in high-powered solar electric propulsion," Michael Gazarik, NASA Associate Administrator for Space Technology, said in a statement.

Still, it may take several years for the probe to meet up with the asteroid. The spacecraft will then envelop the space rock with a bag of sorts, as a newvideo animation of NASA's Asteroid Initiative missiondepicts, and de-spin the rock, likely using thrusters.

The asteroid will then be towed to a "stable orbit in the Earth-moon system where astronauts can visit and explore it," NASA officials wrote in a mission description Wednesday.

These visits will be made possible by Orion and the Space Launch System, which are slated to begin flying crews together by 2021. The NASA animation shows astronauts aboard Orion meeting up with the space rock, which the retrieval probe is still holding onto.

See original here:

Inside NASA's Plan to Catch an Asteroid (Bruce Willis Not Required)

NASA | SEXTANT: Navigating by Cosmic Beacon

By: NASAexplorer

More here:

NASA | SEXTANT: Navigating by Cosmic Beacon - Video

First Light for AMS on This Week @ NASA...
Researchers have published the first findings of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a particle physics detector on the International Space Station that s...

By: NASAtelevision

View post:

First Light for AMS on This Week @ NASA... - Video

D-von Peters bench press "NASA powerlifting"
After a hard day of spotting and loading at a powerlifting meat!!!

By: jackrabit263

See the original post here:

D-von Peters bench press "NASA powerlifting" - Video

NASA #39;s SEXTANT: Universal Navigation System by Cosmic Beacon Methodology
NASA #39;s SEXTANT: Universal Navigation System by Cosmic Beacon Methodology "Imagine a technology that would allow space travelers to transmit gigabytes of data...

By: Mike Stratton

See the original post:

NASA's SEXTANT: Universal Navigation System by Cosmic Beacon Methodology - Video

Nasa Sayo Na Ang Lahat :") (JANELLE)

By: krizzie eder

Read more:

Nasa Sayo Na Ang Lahat :") (JANELLE) - Video

Fox, NASA, the new Xbox, and more - 90 Seconds on The Verge: Monday, April 8th, 2013
If I could turn back time (The lady #39;s not for turning) If I could find a way (We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen...

By: TheVerge

Read the rest here:

Fox, NASA, the new Xbox, and more - 90 Seconds on The Verge: Monday, April 8th, 2013 - Video

ROCHESTER, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

ITT Exelis (XLS) and the NASA Langley Research Center completed a flight campaign in March that measured carbon dioxide over various surfaces and conditions as a step toward taking active global measurements from space.

Using a NASA DC-8 aircraft and an instrument built by Exelis called the Multifunctional Fiber Laser LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), the team took carbon dioxide measurements from various, challenging environments. The information was gathered from high altitudes over fresh and aged snow surfaces, ocean surfaces in high winds, tall coastal and forest conditions, and in the presence of thin cirrus clouds.

The science community has stated clearly, the ability to improve climate models depends directly on our ability to obtain more accurate CO measurements, said Eric Webster, vice president of Exelis weather systems. Using our active LIDAR system from space would enable significant improvements in global mapping of carbon sources and sinks and thus improve climate models. Results over several years and dozens of flights, including this campaign, prove our solution works and would provide decision-makers with more accurate information.

In 2007, the National Research Council released its decadal survey recommending the use of an active LIDAR system to provide new information on carbon dioxide processes over all regions of the Earth, during night and day. NASA Langley Research Center is evaluating the Exelis instrument to determine its effectiveness for the mission. The Exelis instrument is based on commercially viable fiber communications technology, which makes it lower cost and risk than other approaches.

Using active LIDAR is important for researchers because current passive instruments for measuring CO from space cannot take measurements at night, at high latitudes where major cities are located, or through clouds, which limits effectiveness. Active instruments also take more accurate measurements in the lower atmosphere where increases and decreases in carbon dioxide take place more often.

Exelis has won three related technology development grants from the NASA Earth Science Technology Office, and is on its ninth task under an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract with the NASA Langley Research Center for evaluation of LIDAR technology. The most recent flight campaign also included instruments from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and from NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory to quantify various approaches. The NASA Langley Research Center and Exelis are working on the next step in the evaluation process, which is to move the measurement concept to a high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle.

About ITT Exelis

Exelis is a diversified, top-tier global aerospace, defense, information and technical services company that leverages a 50-year legacy of deep customer knowledge and technical expertise to deliver affordable, mission-critical solutions for global customers. We are a leader in communications, sensing and surveillance, critical networks, electronic warfare, navigation, air traffic solutions and information systems with growing positions in C4ISR, composite aerostructures, logistics and technical services. Headquartered in McLean, Va., the company employs about 19,900 people and generated 2012 sales of $5.5 billion. For more information, visit our website at http://www.exelisinc.com or connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Follow this link:

Exelis and NASA complete flight campaign tests of carbon dioxide measuring instrument

Dissatisfied with the current state of the solar system, NASA is looking to do a little remodeling.The space agency is angling to capture a small asteroid and drag it closer to Earth for human exploration, the Associated Press reported April 6. The Obama administration's proposed budget for 2014 will include $100 million to kick off the project, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Science and Space, told reporters. Nelson's statements confirmed a March report in Aviation Week about the mission.The idea is to accelerate human exploration of the solar system, particularly the bodies that have never seen human visitors--namely, everywhere except Earth and the moon. Back in 2010, President Obama announced his intention to send human explorers to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025 and to Mars sometime in the 2030s. According to the AP, under the new plan a robotic craft would snag a yet to be-selected asteroid in 2019 and return it to the vicinity of the moon for a human spacewalking mission two years later.The plan builds on a proposal examined in a 2012 report from the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) at the California Institute of Technology. In that report, an expert group estimated that a robotic probe could capture a seven-meter, 500,000-kilogram asteroid and haul it back to lunar orbit for exploration by 2025. That alone would cost about $2.6 billion, according to the KISS report (pdf), but somehow the version of the plan described to NBC News by an anonymous Obama administration source would do the same thing four years faster for less than half the cost. (Magic 8-Ball says: "Don't Count on It.")Details aside, what's the point of going to an asteroid? The KISS report highlights a few justifications, including the planetary science benefits of the first asteroid "dissection," as well as the planetary defense benefit of anchoring to an asteroid, which may someday prove useful if a space rock is found to be on a dangerous trajectory and needs to be rerouted. What is more, an asteroid mission could open the door to the spaceborne extraction of precious materials, as has been proposed by Planetary Resources, Inc. (which bills itself as "The Asteroid Mining Company").But the real advantage of asteroid exploration is that astronauts could simply sidle up to a small space rock without the need for a costly, complex landing module, as is required to negotiate the gravitational pull of a larger body such as Mars or the moon. The downside is that the idea of an asteroid mission has hardly stoked the passion of the public since it was first announced three years ago. And it is hard to imagine a spacewalking exploration of a dusty little rock with a name like 2008 EV5 garnering the same excitement as a mission to an object that looms large in the night sky and in our imagination.In his remarks to reporters, Nelson called the asteroid mission "a clever concept." One of my esteemed colleagues calls it "batsh*t crazy." I'd say it's somewhere in between. On one hand, it does feel a bit like "make-work," as my colleague put it--creating a destination just so we have somewhere to go. On the other hand, no human being has left low Earth orbit in 40 years. And if it's an asteroid expedition that breaks that drought, I'll take it. Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs.Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news. 2013 ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved.

Continued here:

NASA Getting into the Asteroid-Moving Business

NASA has selected five planet hunters to receive the 2013 Carl Sagan Exoplanet Postdoctoral Fellowships. The fellowship, named for the late astronomer, was created to inspire the next generation of explorers seeking to learn more about planets, and possibly life, around other stars.

The primary goal of the fellowship program is to support outstanding recent postdoctoral scientists in conducting independent research related to the science goals of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program.

Significant discoveries have already been made by previous Sagan Fellows. One recent discovery found that the size and location of an asteroid belt may determine whether complex life will evolve on an Earth-like planet

"In the past decade, astronomers have made incredible progress toward Carl Sagan's goal of understanding the existence of life, and ultimately, of intelligent life throughout the universe," said Charles Beichman, executive director of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The young scientists named as this year's Sagan Fellows will help to make dramatic new progress toward this goal through their observational, theoretical and instrumental contributions."

The program, created in 2008, awards selected postdoctoral scientists with annual stipends of $65,500 for up to three years, plus an annual research budget of up to $16,000.

The 2013 Sagan Fellows:

-- Jared Males, who will work at the University of Arizona, Tucson, to investigate exoplanetary habitability by perfecting instrumentation to image Jupiter- and Saturn-sized planets in the liquid- water habitable zone of nearby stars.

-- Katja Poppenhaeger, who will work at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass., to explore how stars and close-in planets influence each other's evolution over time.

-- Jacob Simon, who will work at the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, to understand the formation of planets out of gas and dust disks.

-- Jennifer Yee, who will work at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., to measure the frequency of massive planets around low mass stars using microlensing.

See the original post here:

NASA Selects 2013 Carl Sagan Fellows

WASHINGTON As NASA begins to apportion the 5 percent budget cut mandated under sequestration, parts of the U.S. space agency are being asked to cough up more so that others can cough up less or be spared altogether, a senior NASA official told an advisory panel April 4.

NASAs Planetary Science Division, which Congress favored with a $200 million increase in the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013 (H.R. 933) that President Barack Obama signed into law March 26, is expected to lose most if not all of that money as sequestration siphons some $900 million off the agencys enacted $17.5 billion top line.

James Green, NASAs Planetary Science Division director, told members of the NASA Advisory Councils planetary science subcommittee not to expect a straight 5 percent across-the-board cut as the agency rolls its top line back to $16.6 billion, as required under sequestration.

In order to protect higher-priority programs, Green said, NASA will be cutting lower-priority programs, including planetary science, by more than 5 percent. [Planetary Science Takes Budget Hit in 2013 (Infographic)]

We are not a protected program, we are not a high-priority program, Green told his fellow planetary scientists. Consequently, you can assume that [the Planetary Science Divisions reduction] would be higher.

Green did not say which agency programs would be spared, but NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has previously identified the James Webb Space Telescope, the Space Launch System heavy-lift rocketand the Commercial Crew Program as top administration priorities.

The agency had already informed Congress that certain things will be protected, Green said. So we will have a reduced program below the funding Congress has provided.

Congress included $1.39 billion in H.R. 933 for NASAs Planetary Science Division a $200 million increase compared with the $1.19 billion the division was getting under a stopgap spending bill that expired March 27.

The exact amount of funding planetary science will losewill not be known for about a month, when NASA sends Congress its proposed operating plan for the remainder of 2013, Green said.

If planetary science loses too much of the increase it got from Congress, it could spell the end of Greens plan to solicit proposals next year for a Discovery-class mission that would launch around the end of the decade.

Read this article:

NASA Planetary Science Bracing for Brunt of Sequester Cuts

The United States has no immediate plans to send astronauts back to the Moon, according to NASA administrator Charles Bolden.

"I don't know how to say it any more plainly. NASA does not have a human lunar mission in its portfolio and we are not planning for one," Bolden said late last week at a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board (ASEB) in Washington, according to Space Politics.

Bolden was responding to a suggestion by UCLA chancellor emeritus and professor Al Carnesale, who leads a group formulating NASA's strategic direction, that the space agency delay a proposed crewed mission to visit an asteroid by 2025 and instead consider returning to the Moon.

"There's a great deal of enthusiasm, almost everywhere, for the Moon. I think there might be, if no one has to swallow their pride and swallow their words, and you can change the asteroid mission a little bit ... it might be possible to move towards something that might be more of a consensus," Carnesale was quoted as saying by Space Politics.

Nearly three years ago, President Barack Obama announced the country's goal of sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid during a speech at the Kennedy Space Center. Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, present at the Kennedy Space Center speech, "has been [to the Moon] ... There's a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do," Obama said at the time.

Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, with Michael Collins piloting the lunar command module, became the first humans to set foot on the Moon on July 21, 1969. Apollo 17 crew members Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ronald Evans were the last in the program to visit Earth's satellite, with Cernan and Schmitt spending four days on the lunar surface in December 1972.

Last May, it was reported that NASA had begun training astronauts for an asteroid mission. In recent years, the space agency has also been focused on planning a manned trip to Mars. One part of those ambitious projects could involve constructing a space station in fixed lunar orbit, which could serve as a launching pad for manned interplanetary missions.

But some in the space community are apparently unhappy with those ambitious plans, according to Carnesale.

"The more we learn about it, the more we hear about it, people seem less enthusiastic about it," he was quoted as saying at last Thursday's meeting in Washington.

Bolden, however, stressed that changing NASA's agreed-upon, long-term objectives would be counter-productive.

Read the original:

NASA: Forget the Moon, Let's Play Asteroids

NASA chief Charles Bolden says the space agency won't be sending astronauts to land on the moon any time soon, according to press reports.

The U.S. space agency won't lead the way back to the moon in the foreseeable future in order to maintain its focus on manned missions to an asteroid, and eventually Mars, Bolden said during a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board last Thursday (April 4), according to aSpacePolitics.com report by Jeff Foust.

"NASA will not take the lead on a human lunar mission," Foust quoted Bolden as saying. "NASA is not going to the moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime. And the reason is, we can only do so many things."

Instead, he said the focus would remain on human missions to asteroids and to Mars. "We intend to do that, and we think it can be done," Bolden said. [Most Amazing Moon Missions in History]

Bolden's comments on new manned moon missions came in response to a suggestion that the scientific community, as a whole, is not enthusiastic about pushing ahead with a manned mission to an asteroid by 2025 an idea endorsed by President Barack Obama in 2010.

In April 2010, Obama called on NASA to pursue the manned asteroid mission as a precursor to sending astronauts to Mars in the mid-2030s. That new space vision, unveiled just after Obama canceled NASA's moon-oriented Constellation program, which sought to send astronauts on new lunar landing missions, in favor of the asteroid and Mars plan.

During the April 4 meeting, Bolden apparently made it clear that NASA does not plan to lead the charge back to the moon's surface.

"I dont know how to say it any more plainly," Bolden said, according to Foust. "NASA does not have a human lunar mission in its portfolio and we are not planning for one."

With Obama now in his second term, Bolden also warned that if the next presidential administration chooses to make another major course change in NASA's human spaceflight program, such a change would mean "we are probably, in our lifetime, in the lifetime of everybody sitting in this room, we are probably never again going to see Americans on the moon, on Mars, near an asteroid, or anywhere. We cannot continue to change the course of human exploration."

NASA made history on July 20, 1969 when Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans ever to walk to on the moon. Five more successful moon landings would follow until 1972, when the series ended with NASA's Apollo 17 mission.

View post:

US Won't Lead New Manned Moon Landings, NASA Chief Says

NASA's robotic Mars explorers are taking a cosmic break for the next few weeks, thanks to an unfavorable planetary alignment of Mars, the Earth and the sun.

Mission controllers won't send any commands to the agency's Opportunity rover, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) or Mars Odyssey orbiter from today (April 9) through April 26. The blackout is even longer for NASA's car-size Curiosity rover, which is slated to go solo from April 4 through May 1.

The cause of the communications moratorium is a phenomenon called a Mars solar conjunction, during which the sun comes between Earth and the Red Planet. Our star can disrupt and degrade interplanetary signals in this formation, so mission teams won't be taking any chances.

"Receiving a partial command could confuse the spacecraft, putting them in grave danger," NASA officials explain in a video posted last month by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. [The Boldest Mars Missions in History]

Opportunity and Curiosity will continue performing stationary science work, using commands already beamed to the rovers. Curiosity will focus on gathering weather data, assessing the Martian radiation environment and searching for signs of subsurface water and hydrated minerals, officials said Monday (April 8).

MRO and Odyssey will also keep studying the Red Planet from above, and they'll continue to serve as communications links between the rovers and Earth. The conjunction will also affect the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, officials have said.

Odyssey will send rover data home as usual during conjunction, though the orbiter may have to relay information multiple times due to dropouts. MRO, on the other hand, entered record-only mode on April 4. The spacecraft will probably have about 52 gigabits of data to relay when it's ready to start transmitting again on May 1, MRO officials have said.

Mars solar conjunctions occur every 26 months, so NASA's Red Planet veterans have dealt with them before. This is the fifth conjunction for Opportunity, in fact, and the sixth for Odyssey, which began orbiting Mars in 2001.

But it'll be the first for Curiosity, which touched down on Aug. 5, kicking off a two-year surface mission to determine if the Red Planet has ever been capable of supporting microbial life.

"The biggest difference for this 2013 conjunction is having Curiosity on Mars," Odyssey mission manager Chris Potts, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement last month.

More here:

NASA Spacecraft Take Spring Break at Mars

Dead Star Warps Light of Red Star | NASA
Dead Star Warps Light of Red Star | Gravity-Bending Find Leads to Kepler Meeting Einstein Like: https://www.facebook.com/SpaceLibrary This artist #39;s animation...

By: SpaceLibrary

Read the original:

Dead Star Warps Light of Red Star | NASA - Video

NASA plans to intercept asteroid
President Barack Obama is putting aside $100m to launch a mission that is aimed at helping scientists learn more about asteroids. It is hoped that should an ...

By: AlJazeeraEnglish

Continue reading here:

NASA plans to intercept asteroid - Video

DigitalSpace

An Orion exploration vehicle approaches a near-Earth asteroid in this artist's conception. Such a mission would be carried out in 2021 under the White House's new plan for NASA exploration beyond Earth orbit.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

NASA's accelerated vision for exploration calls for moving a near-Earth asteroid even nearer to Earth, sending out astronauts to bring back samples within a decade, and then shifting the focus to Mars, a senior Obama administration official told NBC News on Saturday.

The official said the mission would "accomplish the president's challenge of sending humans to visit an asteroid by 2025 in a more cost-effective and potentially quicker time frame than under other scenarios." The official spoke on condition of anonymity because there was no authorization to discuss the plan publicly.

The source said more than $100 million would be sought for the mission and other asteroid-related activities in its budget request for the coming fiscal year, which is due to be sent to Congress on Wednesday. That confirms comments made on Friday by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., a one-time spaceflier who is now chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Science and Space. It also confirms a report about the mission that appeared last month in Aviation Week.

The asteroid retrieval mission is based on a scenario set out last year by a study group at the Keck Institute for Space Studies. NASA's revised scenario would launch a robotic probe toward a 500-ton, 7- to 10-meter-wide (25- to 33-foot-wide) asteroid in 2017 or so. The probe would capture the space rock in a bag in 2019, and then pull it to a stable orbit in the vicinity of the moon, using a next-generation solar electric propulsion system. That would reduce the travel time for asteroid-bound astronauts from a matter of months to just a few days.

{{percent}}%

({{numVotes}} votes)

{{data.totalVotes}} votes

See the rest here:

Administration confirms NASA plan: Grab an asteroid, then focus on Mars

NASA will use a robotic spaceship to capture an asteroid and bring it closer to the moon. Astronauts will then explore the asteroid in the hopes of developing technology to nudge dangerous asteroids away from Earth.

The US space agency is planning for a robotic spaceship to capture a small asteroid and park it near the moon for astronauts to explore, a top senator disclosed Friday.

Subscribe Today to the Monitor

Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly Digital Edition

The plan would speed up by four years the existing mission to land astronauts on an asteroid by bringing the space rock closer to Earth, Sen. Bill Nelson said.

The robotic ship would capture the 500-ton, 25-foot (450 metric-ton, 7.6-meter) asteroid in 2019. Then using an Orion space capsule, now being developed, a crew of about four astronauts would nuzzle up next to the rock in 2021 for spacewalking exploration, according to a government document obtained by The Associated Press.

Nelson said this would helpNASAdevelop the capability to nudge away a dangerous asteroid if one headed to Earth in the future. It also would be training for a future mission to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s, he said.

Nelson, chairman of the Senate science and space subcommittee, said President Barack Obama is putting $100 million in planning money for the accelerated asteroid mission in the 2014 budget that comes out next week. The money would be used to find the right small asteroid.

"It really is a clever concept," Nelson said in a news conference in Florida, the state whereNASAlaunches take place. "Go find your ideal candidate for an asteroid. Go get it robotically and bring it back."

While there are thousands of asteroids that size out there, finding the right one that comes by Earth at just the right time to be captured will not be easy, said Donald Yeomans, who headsNASA'sNear Earth Object program that monitors close-by asteroids. He said once a suitable rock is found, it would be captured with the space equivalent of "a baggie with a drawstring. You bag it. You attach the solar propulsion module to de-spin it and bring it back to where you want it."

Read the original here:

Sen. Bill Nelson announces NASA 's plan to capture asteroid

MIT

An artist's conception shows the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, in space. (Planets not to scale.)

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

NASA has selected two new space missions for launch in 2017:a satellite that can scan the entire sky for exoplanets and a space station experiment that can monitor cosmic X-ray emissions. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the Neutron-star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) won out at the end of a selection process that took more than two years.

"With these missions we will learn about the most extreme states of matter by studying neutron stars, and we will identify many nearby star systems with rocky planets in the habitable zone for further study by telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope," John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science, said in a statement Friday.

Under the terms of NASA's Explorer Program, the TESS mission will be budgeted at no more than $200 million, and NICER's mission costs will be capped at $55 million. Those price tags exclude the cost of the launch vehicle.

Planet hunter TESS is designed to follow up on NASA's Kepler mission, which is surveying a patch of sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra for extrasolar planets. Like Kepler, TESS would detect other worlds by looking for the faint dips in starlight as they make regular transits across their parent suns. TESS' array of wide-angle cameras would take in much more territory, however.

"TESS will carry out the first space-borne all-sky transit survey, covering 400 times as much sky as any previous mission," principal investigator George Ricker, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said in a statement. "It will identify thousands of new planets in the solar neighborhood, with a special focus on planets comparable in size to the Earth."

The mission's scientists say it will be possible to study the masses, sizes, densities, orbits and atmospheres of a wide range of planets, including a sampling of the rocky worlds in the habitable zones of nearby planetary systems. "The selection of TESS has just accelerated our chances of finding life on another planet within the next decade," said MIT planetary scientist Sara Seager.

TESS won out over another planet-hunting mission designed to study alien atmospheres, known as theFast Infrared Exoplanet Spectroscopy Survey Explorer or FINESSE.

Go here to read the rest:

NASA chooses all-sky planet hunter, neutron star watcher for liftoff in 2017