Tag: grand challenge

Back in June, NASA issued a “Grand Challenge” to catalogue all of the near-Earth asteroids that could potentially threaten life on the planet. As part of the initiative, NASA began soliciting ideas on how to locate, redirect, and explore these asteroids.

The agency received a huge response, with over 400 ideas coming from industry, universities, and the public. NASA is currently reviewing each of the responses, one-third of which relate to the challenge’s main request to find threatening asteroids and deal with them.

Today, NASA announced that it has now completed a mission formulation review for internal NASA studies on the topic of a different asteroid mission. NASA leaders at the meeting reviewed the agency’s technical concepts for each phase of a mission to put an asteroid into a lunar orbit and send a manned crew to explore it. An asteroid mission concept will now be created by NASA officials based on the current best concepts. The mission, according to NASA, will continue to be developed in the coming year.

“At this meeting, we engaged in the critically important work of examining initial concepts to meet the goal of asteroid retrieval and exploration,” said Robert Lightfoot, the chairman of the review and an associate administrator at NASA. “The agency’s science, technology, and human exploration teams are working together to better understand near-Earth asteroids, including ones potentially hazardous to our planet; demonstrate new technologies; and to send humans farther from home than ever before. I was extremely proud of the teams and the progress they have made so far. I look forward to integrating the inputs as we develop the mission concept further.”

The asteroid mission is part of a NASA plan to send humans to Mars by the 2030s, a challenge set by President Obama. The mission will use technology developed for the Orion space capsule and new SSL rockets.

NASA and astronomers around the world have been tracking asteroids for decades now. Though asteroids seem to be constantly be giving the Earth a close miss, no ‘doomsday’ asteroids have yet been found. That doesn’t mean they aren’t out there, though, hurdling toward Earth with the potential to end life as we know it.

With that in mind, NASA this week issued a “Grand Challenge” to find all asteroids that could potentially threaten human existence and develop the means to deal with them. The challenge was issued at an asteroid initiative industry and partner day at NASA Headquarters.

“NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth’s orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth,” said Lori Garver deputy administrator at NASA. “This Grand Challenge is focused on detecting and characterizing asteroids and learning how to deal with potential threats. We will also harness public engagement, open innovation and citizen science to help solve this global problem.”

As part of the challenge, NASA is now soliciting ideas on how to accomplish the goal from private industry and other potential partners. The ultimate goal would be to locate, redirect, and explore an asteroid. The agency is also asking for plans to deal with potential asteroid threats.

NASA’s Grand Challenges are what they call “ambitious” projects with a large scale that will need significant science and technology breakthroughs to accomplish. The Obama administration has also promoted NASA’s challenges as a part of its Strategy for American Innovation.

“I applaud NASA for issuing this Grand Challenge because finding asteroid threats, and having a plan for dealing with them, needs to be an all-hands-on-deck effort,” said Tom Kalil, deputy director for technology and innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “The efforts of private-sector partners and our citizen scientists will augment the work NASA already is doing to improve near-Earth object detection capabilities.”