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Mission to collect rock samples from asteroid

London: The European Space Agency is planning an ambitious mission in which an uncrewed robot would land on an asteroid near Earth and extract up to 300 gm of dust and rock.

Detailed plans for the Marco Polo mission are being developed at the company’s EADS Astrium in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, and OHB in Bremen, Germany. If the plans are approved by ESA, the mission could launch in 2017. It would cost around €300 million.

Understanding the composition of asteroids is of great interest to planetary scientists because they represent the debris that was left behind when the solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago.

Matthew Genge at Imperial College London said: “We’ve got over 30,000 meteorites in collections around the world, but we don’t know where the majority of them come from — exactly which asteroids.”

Dr. Genge added: “The value of going into space is that we know exactly which asteroid it comes from and that tells us how far from the sun it probably formed and that gives us that little extra information about the formation of our solar system.”

Ralph Cordey at Astrium said: “We’ve got to look at all elements — how we would design the mission, how to design the trajectory to one of a number of possible asteroids, how to optimise that so we use the smallest spacecraft, the least fuel and the smallest rocket.”

One scenario would involve a launching from Europe’s Kourou spaceport in French Guiana using a Soyuz rocket before undertaking a series of gradually higher orbits of the earth. From here the space craft would fire off towards a near-earth asteroid — a journey that could take two-and-a-half years.

Once there, the craft would spend months mapping the surface so that mission controllers could decide on a suitable landing site. After landing it would need to be kept in place using downward thrusters because of the asteroid’s weak gravity. At the same time it would use a coring device to remove samples of dust and rock.

During take off it will take photographs of the landing site. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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