[X] My Assistant

[TheAnt]

Thank you Yaohua for this information. A proposal to get 3 asteroids visited with one mission could make that attractive that the proposal might get a go ahead.

MOD NOTE: Follow-on discussion re multiple encounters moved here.

[vjkane]

MOD NOTE: New topic split from previous posts here.

A proposal to get 3 asteroids visited with one mission could make that attractive that the proposal might get a go ahead.

There have been various concepts in the US planetary community for similar missions. I'm not sure if any made it to the status of formal proposals to the Discovery program. Eventually some space agency is likely to do this.

[vjkane]

I've been wondering if a team would propose a mission similar to Dawn to visit additional main belt asteroids. In some ways, the New Frontiers candidate mission to the Trojan asteroids would do that with 1-2 flybys and orbiting one body (summary here).

However the flight times are long and that imposes a ~$5M/year penalty during cruise. At the recently completed OPAG meeting, Alfred McEwen (HiRISE PI and PI for the proposed Discovery mission) said that the Discovery budget was really isn't large enough for outer planet missions (although he said several teams made proposals in the hopes that NASA's desire to fly an ASRG power system would tip NASA towards a longer mission). Those long flight times equally hurt a lot of asteroid and comet rendezvous missions, although they can use solar panels instead of plutonium for power.