January 2017
New oceans beckon for solar sail technology
...), in mid-2018 NASA is developing its own deep space solar sail mission called the Near Earth Asteroid Scout. NASA plans to send humans to a Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) in the early part of the next decade as part of a long-range plan to send...
August 2017
Big science from small spacecraft
... will also be the first planetary cubesat mission to use ‘green’ propulsion. Another project under development is the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout, which will deploy a solar sail that catches sunlight to steer a flight path taking it from a lunar...
08 September 2016
Close encounters of the asteroid kind: 2016 RB1 passes remarkably close to Earth
...and an aphelion greater than 0.983 astronomical units – though in reality, nearly all Aten asteroids have an aphelion greater than 1 AU. Aten asteroids make up about 6% of known near-earth asteroids. The first week of September has seen more than its...
04 February 2022
NASA’s real-life “Don’t Look Up” programme
..., the ATLAS system has discovered more than 700 near-Earth asteroids and 66 comets, along with detection of 2019 MO and 2018 LA, two very small asteroids that actually impacted Earth. The system is specially designed to detect objects that approach...
July 2019
Who owns outer space?
.... It has set its sights on Near-Earth Asteroids which pass within about 50 million km of Earth’s orbit and views them as ‘outer...model that reflects the way humans feel about the Moon and near-Earth objects - that they are ours? About the author Angela...
October 2021
Mining lunar hydrogen
... years, while platinum, copper and nickel will last for 40 years. Alternative ‘storeroom’ The Moon and near-Earth asteroids present an alternative ‘storeroom’ containing millions of tons of iron, nickel, cobalt, platinum and other metals. In the last...
