Arizona Space Grant Consortium Alumni – The “Asteroid Hunter” Book to be Released in 2024

On a brisk day in February, 2004, Dante Lauretta, an assistant professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, got a call from Michael Drake, the head of the school’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. “I have Lockheed Martin in my office,” Drake said. “They want to fly a spacecraft to an asteroid and bring back a sample. Are you in?”

The two men met that evening with Steve Price, then a director of business development for Lockheed Martin Space, on the patio of a hotel bar in Tucson. Over drinks, they scribbled ideas on cocktail napkins. Price explained that the company’s engineers had developed technology that would allow a spacecraft about the size of a mail truck to rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid, then enter a hummingbird-like mode and “kiss” its surface. The craft’s “beak” would be an unfolding eleven-foot-long mechanism with a cannister on its end, which would kick up material with a little blast of nitrogen. The spacecraft would stow this bounty in a protective capsule, fly back home, and then parachute it to Earth.

 

Read the full article on the New Yorker website.

Author Credit: By David W. Brown

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA