Asteroid Itokawa Will Be Mankind’s Next Stop Beyond Low Earth Orbit
If movies are “educational” at all, then we know visiting asteroids is an extremely dangerous mission. Heck, Owen Wilson’s character in Armageddon summed it up saying the “scariest environment imaginable” when describing that team landing on the Earth-buster that was headed their way.
But is that really the case? And will we have the means to find out at some point? There had been hope a visit to the asteroid Itokawa would be one of mankind’s first trips to one of these objects.
Asteroid (25143) Itokawa is a small near-Earth object that has been studied due to its close proximity to Earth. It is classified as an S-type asteroid and is a member of the Apollo group.
These are asteroids that cross Earth’s orbit. It measures about 535 meters by 294 meters by 209 meters. It was named after Hideo Itokawa, a Japanese rocket scientist who is considered the father of Japanese rocketry.
At one point, a mission to the asteroid named Itokawa was thought to be in the planning stages.
In 2012, NASA’s Desert Rats program for technology development was busy training astronauts aboard a simulator of the Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle (MMSEV) with a computer-generated Itokawa as its target.
At that point, they were still years away from having all the hardware that would make this kind of mission a possibility, but NASA was wasting no time in shaking out the kinks in their mission simulators.
Dr Igor Lisov, a Russian spaceflight expert told Space Daily that due to the characteristics of Itokawa, every bit of prep work could be helpful for the mission.
In 2005, Itokawa was studied in some detail by a Japanese probe…It is a 530-metre potato-shaped rock with a very uneven gravitational field. Accordingly, studying the conditions on it could be helped by computer simulation.
A mission to an asteroid may not be quite the giant leap that the moon landing was, but it would help to develop some of the technologies that would be useful on a long trip to Mars.
It has been suggested that any Mars mission needs to first be preceded with a much simpler mission to one of the red planet’s moons in order to fully work out the kinks of long-distance space travel without having to worry about landing on the surface of Mars.
The vetting of technologies on an Itokawa mission would provide a pretty good excuse to skip this rather expensive extra step and go straight on to a Mars landing for the next mission… that is, whenever NASA could find the money for it.
Whether or not you think that an asteroid mission is a logical next step on the way to Mars, I think we can all agree that the MMSEV simulator looks pretty freakin cool.
