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#560
by
JasonAW3
on 17 Jun, 2016 13:52
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The moon should be cheaper now than when Constellation was the only path. Between SLS and more capable lower price commercial LVs (FH, Vulcan, OA NGLV) plus X prize landers and rovers costs have come down. The commercial companies are more than capable of handling cargo side of any missions.
Sent from my SM-T810 using Tapatalk
Assuming that the Moon does become a goal, then this could get SpaceX's MCT partially funded by the government. Assuming that they can prove that they can land a Dragon 2 capsule, on land, after reentry, that is.
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#561
by
JasonAW3
on 17 Jun, 2016 14:03
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Is it just me or did anyone else notice the rather oddly regular shape of 2008 EV5 in the Nasa ARM reference document?
It looks like a pair of tunicated cones fused base to base, then hammered a bit over their outer surfaces. Oddly regular in shape.
Probably two same sized asteroids that had a low speed impact with one another, squishing out a bit in the middle, but still, a rather odd shape.
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#562
by
KelvinZero
on 21 Jun, 2016 02:58
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With the discovery of HO3, there is now a target to aim for without hauling some VW sized rock back from elsewhere. HO3 is about 9M mi at its closest. Taking Orion with a Bigelow hab seems like a reasonable early (yea..that's a relative term here) mission.
I see a thread has started on that. I will put my negativity here :-)
I far prefer the ARRM concept. The attraction of actually going to a rock just seems to be romanticism to me. I think if we do the ARRM mission, and extend it to a DSH, we will actually be practicing everything we need to master an asteroid colony, as well as other possible applications of a high lunar orbit outpost. it is closer and safer, I expect allowing Apollo-13 style free return. There is no reason to tie yourself to just one rock that happens to be in a convenient orbit. Instead we can keep pulling in new samples to our convenient near-earth ISRU testbed.
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#563
by
mike robel
on 21 Jun, 2016 20:26
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A search for Asteroid 2004 MN4 did not turn up a lot of hits on the site. Seems to me, since it will be in the neighborhood, we would be able to accomplish multiple tasks by sending a spacecraft after it. Presupposing it could be ready in time. After all, it will be sailing by in visual sight of half the planet in 2029 and possibly around in 2035 again.
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#564
by
A_M_Swallow
on 23 Jun, 2016 07:21
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Does anyone have information on how much cargo the ARM SEP tug can take to lunar orbit?
Also how much cargo to Mars orbit?
I am assuming the SEP tug returns to LEO empty to pick up a second cargo.
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#565
by
catdlr
on 20 Mar, 2017 21:39
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These NASA-designed grippers can lift massive rocks
Published on Mar 20, 2017
NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab created these super-strong grippers that can anchor and grip rocks at any angle.
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#566
by
FutureSpaceTourist
on 28 Mar, 2017 14:05
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#567
by
redliox
on 29 Mar, 2017 00:28
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From NAC HEO meeting:
Gerst said (I think) that they’re planning to replace the planned crewed element of ARM with an extended mission in cislunar space.
https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/846721486345949184
Extended mission in Cislunar space doesn't specify much aside from an Apollo 8 redux. If done in the NRO the views of the Moon would exchange extensively I'm sure.
Well ashes to ashes, rust to rust, ARM has officially bit the dust...
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#568
by
whitelancer64
on 17 Jun, 2017 19:51
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Question: was any hardware for ARM actually built?
Specifically wondering about any SEP hardware.
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#569
by
wannamoonbase
on 07 Jul, 2017 02:43
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I'm happy that this dull mission to nowhere has been ended.
40 years in LEO should teach us one thing, a destination matters.
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#570
by
tea monster
on 07 Jul, 2017 07:11
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We were going somewhere, we were going to have a deep-space ion-drive tug.
Now we are back to promises and power point presentations. Yeah, that's great.
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#571
by
AncientU
on 07 Jul, 2017 13:06
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We were going somewhere, we were going to have a deep-space ion-drive tug.
Now we are back to promises and power point presentations. Yeah, that's great.
Did ARM ever get beyond promises and PowerPoint?
Question: was any hardware for ARM actually built?
I am specifically wondering about any SEP hardware.
No
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#572
by
tea monster
on 07 Jul, 2017 16:09
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No, but it was a real program that was funded and authorised. It was still in the study stage, but it was an approved mission that would have progressed to flight hardware had it been allowed to continue. We would have had a deep-space ion-drive tug, which is similar to the vehicle proposed for the Deep Space Gateway - which is just a presentation at the moment.
It would also have got astronauts out of LEO - again, a real program that was funded and approved.
The Deep Space Gateway is a nice idea and fits well with expanding out to the Moon, and eventually Mars, but it isn't funded and isn't an approved mission. This may all come to pass in the future, but we've traded a 'working' program for a concept that only exists as artwork.
We've been doing that a lot over the last few years and I find it heartbreaking to see yet another chance for us to do something with our space program thrown away for vague promises of something better in the future that may (but based on history, probably won't) be better.
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#573
by
jgoldader
on 08 Jul, 2017 13:00
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The original mission concept, sending a crew on a long voyage, didn't sell well, cost too much, and was risky. The descoped mission, spending billions of dollars to get 2 people a few days at a meters-diameter rock brought into cislunar space, never had a chance.
It's possible that ARM's SEP system might live on as the propulsion module of the Gateway, but we'll see. Without going OT, it's fair to say that at the very least, Gateway will cost a whole lot more than ARM.
Despite Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Chelyabinsk, the idea of studying NEOs continues to have a high "giggle factor." When I hear people dismissing the potential threat of NEOs, I get this mental image of people in a lifeboat laughing at shark fins in the water. You'd have to look a long time to find a stronger advocate of studying NEOs than me. But even to me, the final version of ARM didn't do nearly enough to justify its cost.
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#574
by
KelvinZero
on 09 Jul, 2017 23:28
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If we are lucky, things wont actually change much.
The value in the ARM mission was in the development of SEP, and the introduction of ISRU as a core goal of HSF.
As a one off, the mission itself does look pretty pointless, especially the portion involving SLS/Orion, which no doubt made SLS/Orion lobby very nervous.
It only became interesting if you keep doing it, reusing the tug and so on, in which case a DSH in lunar orbit would naturally have become a part of it. The reason I call this "interesting" is that even if we did nothing else but this -- if we got stuck in a boondoggle of visiting a DSH in lunar orbit which is also visited by samples taken from asteroids, doing ISRU and mastering a more industrial form of technology than the ISS, the central goal being humans and ISRU, not supersensitive microgravity experiments -- then we would still be on the path to asteroid colonisation, the right way, solving the technology to become self sufficient rather than dead-end destination-driven missions that abhor solving problems that do not necessarily have solutions in known timeframes.
The DSH is a wonderful goal that happens to be a lot more expensive. It might happen to be politically more palatable.
If we get a DSH in lunar orbit we will get a lot of practical technology development, moving things from theory to readiness for missions of significant duration.
Apart from that though, it will just be people sitting there. What will they be doing? They have to find something. Lunar teleoperation is one thing, but not enough to justify moving from LEO. I think one thing this DSH will quite likely end up doing is ARM style missions and ISRU investigations, especially if the SEP development gets funded independently, perhaps as a tool to service the DSH. In that case the horrible expensive ARM missions that so offended certain lobbies will suddenly be noticed to be only a hundredth of the cost and give 50% of the justification for the whole project.
We might even have small reusable robotic sample return vehicles to the moon, extracting samples of dozens of locations and returning to an ISRU lab and eventually back to earth. This would be sort of like "ARM on chemicals"
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#575
by
savuporo
on 10 Jul, 2017 05:18
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Lunar teleoperation is one thing, but not enough to justify moving from LEO...
Cutting the 2 second time lag Earth-Moon to 0.5 seconds DSH-Moon ? This would be positively insane attempt of justifying this, i hope nobody seriously tries.
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#576
by
KelvinZero
on 11 Jul, 2017 00:27
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Lunar teleoperation is one thing, but not enough to justify moving from LEO...
Cutting the 2 second time lag Earth-Moon to 0.5 seconds DSH-Moon ? This would be positively insane attempt of justifying this, i hope nobody seriously tries.
Ok, perhaps I should have said "not nearly, remotely enough"
I still expect it will be one of the things we will dabble in if we have a DSH in high lunar orbit.
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#577
by
Forrest White
on 17 Sep, 2020 12:13
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Nowadays, in order to plan asteroid missions, NASA with Planetary Resources developed an app that looks for asteroids in the sky. The application and the new algorithm will allow NASA to create a base of near-Earth objects in our solar system, detect dangerous objects crossing the Earth's orbit, and plan missions to asteroids.
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#578
by
libra
on 15 Oct, 2020 13:14
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"Everything old, is new again"
1966 variant of ARM, with some differences...
The goal was mostly similar: catching some "virgin" asteroid or dust, and read it like an open book about solar system pre-history.
That peculiar Agena was to reach EML-5, look for the Kordylewski clouds there and take some samples, to be send back to Earth for analysis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kordylewski_cloud
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#579
by
yg1968
on 23 Dec, 2022 20:45
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See below on the interesting history of the ARM mission:
I am not sure where this belongs but this is an interesting twitter thread on the history of the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM):
1/n I was in some of the meetings when ARM was decided. We were told to visit an asteroid, but the out-and-back to a long-synodic small body (no gravity assist) would be too long so radiation would exceed allowable. We had to invent an alternative and yet "visit an asteroid."
2/n I heard some astronauts laughing on the telecon, "hey, if we want to visit an asteroid, we can rent a winnebago and go visit one on a road trip!" When we reviewed the timeline for the out-and-back mission they allotted several days at the asteroid. One crew member asked...
3/ ... what they would be doing for that many days. Someone else spoke up, "The first day you will collect rocks. The next five days you will play cards until you are allowed to come home." Lol. True story.
4/ Fortunately, there was a paper published in 2010 that argued that the definition of an asteroid should be changed from >10m diameter to >1m diameter. This was the key thing NASA needed to justify bringing back a boulder and saying it is an asteroid. No joke -- a single paper.
5/ So the plan changed to robotically bringing back the "asteroid" so we could visit it without too much radiation to the crew and check the box that we did as told. Nevertheless, I agree it would've been a great mission, despite the crazy way we got to it.
6/ Because of my work in regolith technology, I was invited onto the Option B formulation team to snag a boulder OFF an asteroid rather than finding one orbiting the Sun. The reason we considered an Option B was because...
7/...we were starting to realize three problems with the original "option A" concept. First, we did not know where any small asteroids actually are (they all get lost immediately after finding them) so it would take years to find one as it closely passes the Earth, then...
8/...more years before its long synodic period brought it close enough to the Earth again to rendezvous and snag it. Only long synodic period rocks were wanted since they offered low-enough delta-v to bring back. Second, we realized their rotational dynamics were a problem.
9/ Generally, a body will (1) rotate, (2) precess, and (3) nutate. To snag a multi-ton rock with a low-mass spacecraft, there's a moment of truth when the spacecraft jerks and is put into the same motion as the rock by brute force. No getting around that. Trying to align...
10/...with a precessing, nutating pole on the rock to minimize the jerk of the spacecraft would be very difficult, especially since it had to be automated as it will occur on the other side of the Sun from Earth during the minimum delta-v mission.
11/... Third, we were learning about that same time that most asteroids are rubble piles. Only the fast-spinners are likely not rubble piles. Rubble piles continually shed mass so that the Poynting-Robinson effect will not spin them up to high rotational rates. So a dilemma:
12/... (A) if you get a fast spinner, how to you grab it and ultra-jerk the flimsy spacecraft without ripping off the solar arrays, or (B) if you get one that isn't a fast spinner, then as soon as you touch it, it flies into a million small pieces because it's a rubble pile.
13/ ...These are literally the discussions that were occurring during that period. We were afraid that if we touched it, and it flew apart, and the spacecraft came back without an asteroid, it would be a deep embarrassment to the space agency. So someone had a bright idea...
14/ JAXA had just visited asteroid Itokawa, and we were all in awe over the many large boulders on the surface. Now Itokawa is a rubble pile, so that means the pieces had collected over time.
15/. That means those boulders USED to be separate asteroids before they merged onto the surface of Itokawa (ummm. well, also the new definition of an asteroid helped, since we couldn't very well snag a >10m diameter boulder off Itokawa.)
16/ So someone said, you know, if we try to grab one of those boulders off Itokawa and it crumbles, we have a WHOLE BUNCH MORE to choose from during the same mission. So Option B was to pull a boulder off a larger asteroid, declare "you are now a free asteroid" and bring it back.
17/ So it would be more complicated than going in a Winnebago to visit an asteroid that has already landed on Earth. By visiting one that landed on another asteroid we could turn it back into an asteroid in space and then visit it, then check the box given us by the politicians.
18/ But the goal of our formulation team was to find what high-quality science and technology goals could be met by this sort of mission, and we did find a lot of real, good science. Example: a planetary defense gravity tug test using the boulder mass we had just extracted.
19/ I still find this story to be hilarious, years later, which I guess is why I am typing a long reply thread about it. My point is, the politics were cra[z]y, but we would still get excellent science and tech from it. I think it would've been a great mission.
20/ One last point I neglected to say. Rumors within NASA say that it was Buzz Aldrin who put the idea of this mission into the ear of the president, who then told us to do it before finding out if it was doable. I think Buzz actually meant to visit Phobos, a Mars-captured rock.
21/21 The politicians thought, the Moon is too easy, Mars is still too hard, so let's go in-between. Unfortunately, the long synodic period by being closer than Mars coupled with no gravity or atmosphere to capture a spacecraft made it worse than either the Moon or Mars. Lol.
https://twitter.com/DrPhiltill/status/1595233546960048129
