Visiting An Asteroid

This week, NASA will host a conference bringing together experts from government, academia, industry, and the international community that will focus on what is required to send humans to a near-Earth asteroid. President Obama has already called for such a flight by NASA by 2025, even though Congress has yet to endorse his plan.

Such a flight would expand human spaceflight capability and do good science, but another factor likely to be put forward in support of such a mission is its contribution to planetary defense. We know it's only a matter of time before Earth is hit once again by an asteroid or comet big enough to threaten our very existence. To counter that threat, we need to know more about those bodies than we do at present, and a human flight to one would help focus public attention and funds on preparing to deflect dangerous bodies away from Earth.

A possible question might also be whether one human flight would be sufficient. We know all asteroids are not the same, so human flights to various bodies, each representing a different category of asteroid, might make sense. Such a program could also build towards human missions to Mars in a systematic way.