NASA Advisory Council Remains Skeptical of Asteroid Redirect Mission

摘要

As NASA continues to weigh two options for the robotic portion of its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), the agency's advisers say they are still unconvinced about the general ARM concept and its relevance to the long-term goal of sending humans to Mars. At a recent meeting of the NASA Advisory Council at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, agency officials said they had not yet made a selection between two approaches for moving a small asteroid, or a boulder off a larger asteroid, into lunar orbit. NASA had planned to make a decision in December on the two choices, known simply as Option A and Option B. In Option A, a spacecraft would shift the orbit of a small asteroid, as much as 10 meters across, into a distant retrograde orbit around the moon. In Option B, a spacecraft would grab a boulder a few meters across from the surface of a larger asteroid and move that into lunar orbit. In both options, a crewed Orion spacecraft would then visit the asteroid.