December 2014
Asteroid Redirect Mission: preparing for Mars in deep space
... (ARM).1 This will include the first-ever robotic and crewed mission to identify, capture and redirect a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) in the area around the Moon. As cislunar space is similar to what a spacecraft would experience on the trip...
February 2016
Searching for water in the Solar System
... NASA’s New Frontiers programme. It will perform detailed characterisation as well as a sample return. The third mission, the Near Earth Asteroid Scout CubeSat is currently in development as part of NASA’s human exploration programme. It would reach...
August 2017
Big science from small spacecraft
... will also be the first planetary cubesat mission to use ‘green’ propulsion. Another project under development is the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout, which will deploy a solar sail that catches sunlight to steer a flight path taking it from a lunar...
October 2021
Mining lunar hydrogen
... years, while platinum, copper and nickel will last for 40 years. Alternative ‘storeroom’ The Moon and near-Earth asteroids present an alternative ‘storeroom’ containing millions of tons of iron, nickel, cobalt, platinum and other metals. In the last...
24 September 2018
Hayabusa2 rovers land successfully on Ryugu
...which has been in orbit around the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu since June, has successfully deployed two... its primary goal of returning a sample from the surface of the asteroid back to Earth in 2020. The small rovers, MINERVA-II1. Rover-1A is on the...
04 February 2022
NASA’s real-life “Don’t Look Up” programme
..., the ATLAS system has discovered more than 700 near-Earth asteroids and 66 comets, along with detection of 2019 MO and 2018 LA, two very small asteroids that actually impacted Earth. The system is specially designed to detect objects that approach...
