I am hoping that I am not duplicating a thread elsewhere on this site ........
The second flight of the SLS is supposed to put a piloted Orion into selenocentric orbit in 2021 or soon thereafter where it will rendezvous with a small captured asteroid.
From what I have read the asteroid capture spacecraft is supposed to be launched on an Atlas-5 in 2015 but I cannot see anything obvious in the Atlas-5 manifest.
I would have expected a lot more hard facts online by now if the capture spacecraft was scheduled for launch within the next year or two ........
I am hoping that I am not duplicating a thread elsewhere on this site ........
The second flight of the SLS is supposed to put a piloted Orion into selenocentric orbit in 2021 or soon thereafter where it will rendezvous with a small captured asteroid.
From what I have read the asteroid capture spacecraft is supposed to be launched on an Atlas-5 in 2015 but I cannot see anything obvious in the Atlas-5 manifest.
I would have expected a lot more hard facts online by now if the capture spacecraft was scheduled for launch within the next year or two ........
No such mission has been started for Atlas V
Thank you Jim! That means a lot of online information is way, way out of date!
Isn't this "asteroid capture" mission, which is to be launched on an Atlas V, the OSIRIS-REx flight planned for 2016?
Completely different. O-R is to return samples of asteroid material to the earth's surface, the proposed asteroid capture is to move an entire (very small) asteroid into earth orbit.