NASA Dawn Asteroid Mission Told to "Stand Back Up", Reinstated! Options

[dvandorn]

Just 'cause I said I would...

Hopefully, though, this whole episode has made its point -- NASA isn't afraid to tell overbudget missions to stand down.

I just *really* wish we could get the magnetometer back on the beastie, though...

-the other Doug

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Actually, the Moomaw was just trying to point out that you can't even rightfully call it an "initial survey" until you've gotten at least one look at all the major types of asteroids -- and the M and D types definitely fall into that category. Asteroid size is less important than their composition.

[JRehling]

I have a long-standing belief that I haven't heard expressed explicitly, so I'll say it here: If we ever get to perform a close flyby of a very large number of asteroids, we would seem to be bound to find some interesting anomalies out there, even though most of those worlds are far too small to have their own dynamic thermal history. But with some permutation of parent bodies, impacts, and just plain the unexpected, and 10,000 chances, there have GOT to be some interesting freaks out there. Maybe an asteroid made primarily of some very rare element, like silver. Maybe a surface that has by statistical chance avoided taking any major impacts in 4 billion years. Maybe an asteroid that was last resurfaced by a single massive electrical discharge. Or one that is highly magnetized.

The above is specific-to-general thinking, but given the surprises you see just in the Saturnian satellites, it seems like a collection of bodies 1,000 times as numerous has got to have some inCREDible freaks among it.

Maybe one day we'll see some sort of solar powered/solar sail craft that has enough autonomy to go on arbitrary numbers of flybys and a fleet of them could visit a very large number of asteroids for not very much money; with longevity on their side, doing so for decades.

Some of those freaky finds would be just curiosities that don't tell us much about anything except the freak itself, but the right kind of find could be a major score for science; in principle, something like this could be more valuable than a mission to a major planet. The hitch is that any such discovery would be rear-loaded: It would probably come with no warning, and hence no opportunity for the given asteroid to ever be assessed by a boardroom full of planners as a worthy target. That's potentially a blindspot of planning methodology.