Exploring Asteroids - Air & Space Magazine

The Million Mile Mission

A small band of believers urges NASA to take its next step—onto an asteroid.

By Michael Klesius
Air & Space Magazine, July 01, 2008

It was another brilliantly sunny day for NASA astronaut Tom Jones. In orbit on his fourth space shuttle mission in February 2001, Jones was outside the International Space Station, installing a new laboratory module. He remembers the moment with great clarity: Gerhard Thiele, another astronaut, called from the ground to relay the news that the robotic NEAR Shoemaker probe had just made the first-ever landing on an asteroid, 433 Eros.

“There I was, turning bolts on the ISS,” says Jones. “I was thinking: What a cool job this is. But how much cooler would it be if I were doing this on an asteroid!”

The idea that astronauts might visit an asteroid and explore it up close had long intrigued him. Today, Jones is more convinced than ever that it would be a grand and worthwhile journey. “The asteroids,” he says, “are begging for a visit.”

By “the asteroids” he doesn’t mean one of the rocks circling out in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, but something a lot closer to home: An Earth-crosser, or NEO (near-Earth object). A rogue.

Jones is part of an unofficial group of NASA actives and alums who have been studying, mostly on their own time, the particulars—engineering requirements, mission trajectories, scientific payoffs, and costs—of a human trip to an asteroid. Like the Mars Underground, a larger group of enthusiasts who for the past 20-plus years have been pushing for a voyage to Mars, the asteroid agitators are trying to build support for a mission. The two groups are far from mutually exclusive: Plenty of Mars Undergrounders share the desire to see Constellation, NASA’s human exploration program, send astronauts rock-hopping first.