Sentences with phrase «capturing small asteroids»

As Gerard K. O'Neill pointed out over 30 years ago, we should be capturing small asteroids and comets for processing in Space, to build habitats and replace Earth based mining and energy production.

The idea is to capture a small asteroid, bring it into orbit around the moon using SEP, and then send astronauts to explore it — a daring and politically contentious concept called the Asteroid Redirect Mission.

Not exact matches

The first concept would fully capture a very small asteroid in free space and the other would retrieve a boulder off of a much larger asteroid.

NASA is currently developing concepts for the redirect mission that will employ a robotic spacecraft, driven by an advanced solar electric propulsion system, to capture a small near - Earth asteroid or remove a boulder from the surface of a larger asteroid.

This concept images shows ARM robotic capture Option B, in which the robotic vehicle ascends from the surface of a large asteroid, on its way to a lunar distant retrograde orbit with a smaller asteroid mass in its clutches.

How NASA could capture an asteroid: A probe approaches and aligns with a small space rock (above), then unfurls what amounts to a high - tech bag and slips it around the target.

One major question about Phobos and Mars» even smaller moon, Deimos, is whether they are captured asteroids or bits of Mars knocked into the sky by impacts.

Due to their small size and irregular shape, they strongly resembled asteroids, but no one understood how Mars could have» captured» them and made them into satellites with almost circular and equatorial orbits.

The bridge mission could be anything from NASA's ambitious plan to capture an asteroid and bring it into lunar orbit where astronauts could explore it, to a small and temporary station where astronauts can learn a little more about fending for themselves while in space.

It had previously been proposed that the two small moons were either wandering asteroids that had been captured by Mars» gravitational influence, or satellites that had coalesced in the wake of a violent collision between the Red Planet and a large impactor.

The formation of this system made of a dual primary and a small moon is still a mystery, but they found the asteroid could be a captured Kuiper body product of the reshuffling of giant planets in our solar system.

there are many small moons that are probably started out as asteroids and were only later captured by a planet;

Even for the capture of much smaller asteroids, there will likely be reservations from all areas of society, though the risks would be much less.»