PASADENA, Calif. (AP) ? Surrounded by engineers, NASA chief Charles Bolden inspected a prototype spacecraft engine that could power an audacious mission to lasso an asteroid and tow it closer to Earth for astronauts to explore.
Bolden checked on the progress Thursday a month after the Obama administration unveiled its 2014 budget that proposes $105 million to jumpstart the mission, which may eventually cost more than $2.6 billion.
Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and Glenn Research Center in Ohio are developing a thruster that relies on ion propulsion instead of conventional chemical fuel.
Once relegated to science fiction, ion propulsion ? which fires beams of electrically charged atoms to propel a spacecraft ? is preferred for deep space cruising because it's more fuel-efficient. Engine testing is expected to ramp up next year.
During his visit to the JPL campus, nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains northeast of Los Angeles, Bolden viewed an engineering model of the engine and peered through a porthole of a vacuum chamber housing the prototype.
NASA is under White House orders to fly humans to an asteroid as a stepping stone to Mars. Instead of sending astronauts to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, as originally planned, the space agency came up with a quicker, cheaper idea: Haul the asteroid close to the moon and visit it there.
Bolden said the original concept was impractical given the flat budget and praised the alternative as "ingenious."
"If you can't get to the asteroid, bring the asteroid to you," Bolden said.
The space agency would launch an ion-powered unmanned spacecraft to snare a yet-to-be-selected small asteroid in 2019 and park it in the moon's neighborhood. Then a spacewalking team would hop on an Orion space capsule that's currently under development and explore the rock in 2021.
Besides preparing astronauts for an eventual trip to Mars, NASA said the asteroid-capture mission is designed to test technologies to deflect threatening space boulders on a collision course with Earth.
"Anytime that you can get up close to an asteroid and understand its composition and its characteristics ... that's getting to know the enemy," said Don Yeomans, who heads NASA's Near Earth Object Program at JPL.
Scientists have a dozen potential small asteroids in mind for the mission, but Yeomans said more observations are needed before settling on a target. Whatever asteroid NASA chooses to redirect, it won't pose a threat to Earth because it would burn up if it inadvertently plunged through the atmosphere, scientists said.
Bolden's JPL stop is part of his annual spring tour of NASA centers around the country. His California journey began Wednesday at the Dryden Flight Research Center in the Mojave Desert where Sierra Nevada Corp. is preparing its Dream Chaser spaceship for test flights later this year before it can make supply runs to the International Space Station. On Friday, Bolden was set to visit the Ames Research Center in the Silicon Valley where engineers are working on various space technologies.
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Follow Alicia Chang at http://twitter.com/SciWriAlicia
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-head-views-progress-asteroid-lasso-mission-184552904.html
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Today, Google has updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week’s I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates including a brand new stream, photos experience and of course Hangouts. The Android version has all of that, and one brand new feature, a new location section. Where the Anroid app really shines is with the photo capabilities. The updated Google+ app now has the auto backup, highlight, enhance and “auto awesome” functionality that the desktop version has. It’s be really handy to be able to enhance your photos directly within the app, rather than waiting until you get back to your computer or relying on Google to do its magical synthetic wrinkle removal, even though it’s cool. To make it easier to “make plans and meet,” Google+ has broken “Locations” out into its own section. Now, when you share your location with certain Circles, your friends can easily find you by tapping on that section. Naturally, it drops everyone’s location onto a Map, which makes it pretty seamless: Location is something that hasn’t been a great piece of Google+ to date. The service currently picks up where you are and asks you for your explicit location, not really telling you who will get to see it. With the Location section and controls, its easier to manage and can turn into an experience similar to that of Foursquare. The stream is getting all of the features from last week, too. The autohashtags will let you drill into new content, hopefully sucking up all of your free time. It turns the Google+ experience into something like Wikipedia, where you can just keep tapping on relevant content and hopefully find some new people to follow along the way. While you’re not going to get the new three-column layout on your smartphone, the drilling down is actually fun. We’ll await the iOS update, but expect the same items to find their way into that version. All of these enhancements are made to entice you to do a little bit more in Google+, as the company doesn’t really expect you to jump ship from one network to another. The features are more complimentary to one another in this update, giving a better experience to new users, which is the most important demographic for Google to focus on right now. Those of
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Public release date: 17-May-2013
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