

Nasa is to reveal details of robotic and manned missions to near Earth asteroids at a Japanese conference in May 2012, according to the Telegraph.

In the agency's report, which is to be presented to the Japan Geoscience Union Meeting, Nasa will reportedly announce plans to send an unmanned spacecraft to an asteroid in 2016, and use a robotic arm to collect samples. In the late 2020s, a manned mission will follow.

The asteroid could be up to four million kilometres from the Earth. That's a tad farther than the Moon, which is just 400,000 km away from our planet, but a lot closer than Mars which is about 56 million km away. The entire trip would take around a year, and astronauts could stay on the space rock for up to a month.

Training for the mission will start in May. Six astronauts (one of them, Major Tim Peake, is the first official British astronaut with the European Space Agency) will be flown to an underwater base off the coast of Florida. There, they'll spend 12 days living 20 metres beneath the ocean.

The training mission -- named Nasa Extreme Environment Mission Operation, or NEEMO -- will apparently simulate working in the difficult low gravity environment of an asteroid. The capsule will be 13 by six metres, and will require 12 hours of decompression before resurfacing.

"NEEMO is as close to the real thing as we can manage on Earth," Peake told the paper. "We are in a confined space and living quarters are very tight."

If the mission goes ahead in the late 2020s, the asteroid adventure could help test technology for future human missions to other planets, including Mars. Plus, it could provide invaluable data for dealing with dangerous asteroids in the future.


Asteroid 99942 Apophis is to make an uncomfortably close call with Earth in 2029, then swing back around for another flyby on 13 April 2036. Nasa has put the odds of Apophis hitting Earth on that return trip at 1 in 250,000.


Latest on