A planetary scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suggesting that asteroids could serve as the means for humanity to travel through space to Mars.
Richard Binzel believes that asteroids could function as stepping stones for astronauts to eventually reach the Red Planet.
NASA has tagged Mars as the "ultimate human destination" in its space exploration missions. The agency is continuing to develop plans to make a flyby, and perhaps even be able to make a landing, on Mars beyond the year 2030.
To prepare for the mission, NASA stated that it is looking to implement the Asteroid Redirect Mission by around the year 2025.
The ARM will have the agency use a robotic probe to drag an asteroid, or at least a boulder-sized rock from a larger asteroid, into the lunar orbit. Once the asteroid has been captured and stabilized, NASA will then send astronauts to visit the asteroid using the Orion crew capsule.
The ARM will provide a preliminary goal for NASA's Space Launch System rockets, which the agency hopes will be able to take astronauts to Mars.
However, Binzel believes that the ARM does not make any sense and is the wrong step in the path towards the development of a Mars exploration mission.
"There's nothing about sending humans to Mars that requires us to capture an asteroid in a baggie. That's a multibillion dollar expenditure that has nothing to do with getting humans to Mars," Binzel said.
According to Binzel, the development of operations and hardware necessary to retrieve and contain an asteroid will provide no value to the knowledge necessary for sending a crew of astronauts for space travel over a long period of time.
Binzel has proposed to scrap ARM entirely. Instead of having to retrieve an asteroid, Binzel suggested that NASA should map the almost 10 million space rocks that are over 33 feet and still uncharted currently in orbit between Earth and Mars. According to his estimate, only 0.1 percent of such asteroids have been so far documented by ground-based telescopes.
Once the asteroids have been mapped, NASA could then develop a series of missions that would allow space crews to go to some of them, the durations of which would be progressively longer. The missions, Binzel said, would build the confidence and experience of NASA to undertake the years-long travel to Mars.
To map the asteroids, Binzel said that NASA would have to develop a dedicated space telescope that would cost about $800 million. The agency should be able to afford such a telescope, now that it has a budget of $17.8 billion.
Binzel added that the mapping project would also allow the detection of asteroids that could be on a collision course with the Earth.
"We have to leave the cradle of Earth sometime," said Binzel. "Asteroid missions could be a win-win for exploration and for safety."
