Decades from now, people on Earth may be gearing up for an unprecedented celestial spectacle the intentional smashing of an asteroid into the moon.

NASA is currently planning out an ambitious mission to snag a near-Earth asteroid and park it in a stable orbit around the moon, where it could be visited repeatedly by astronauts for scientific and exploration purposes. But the asteroid-capture mission may not end when astronauts leave the space rock for the last time. Seeing it through could require disposing of the asteroid in a safe and possibly very dramatic manner, experts say.

"You can be comfortable that [the asteroid] will stay in this orbit for 100 years or so," Paul Chodas, a scientist with the Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,Calif., said earlier this month during a panel discussion at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Space 2013 conference in San Diego.[NASA's Asteroid-Capture Mission in Pictures]

"But if that's not enough, I think that, once you're finished with it and you have no further need of it, send it in to impact the moon," Chodas added. "That makes sense to me."

A bold plan

NASA announced the asteroid-retrieval effort in April. The plan calls for a robotic spacecraft to rendezvous with a roughly 25-foot-wide (7.6 meters), 500-ton space rock and drag it to a stable lunar orbit.

Alternatively, the probe could break a chunk off a larger asteroid; NASA is investigating both options. Either way, astronauts would then fly out to this transplanted rock using NASA's Orion capsule and Space Launch System mega-rocket (SLS), which are slated to fly crews together for the first time in 2021.

The mission represents one way to achieve a major goal laid out by President Barack Obama, who in 2010 directed the space agency to get astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, then on to the vicinity of Mars by the mid-2030s.

Grabbing a space rock would also help develop asteroid-mining technology, reveal insights about the solar system's early days and give humanity critical experience working in deep space, NASA officials say.

"It provides a tremendous target to develop our capabilities and operation techniques for our crews in the future as we go beyond low-Earth orbit," NASA human exploration chief Bill Gerstenmaier said during the panel discussion at Space 2013.

Originally posted here:

NASA May Slam Captured Asteroid Into Moon (Eventually)