ARM...

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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — NASA will weigh several factors when it makes a Dec. 16 decision on a plan for its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), including how well each option supports later human missions to Mars, according to the agency official who will make that decision.

In an interview here Dec. 1, NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot said he will use a “matrix” of variables when deciding between two options for carrying out the robotic portion of ARM.

In one approach, called simply Option A by NASA, a robotic spacecraft would shift the orbit of a small near-Earth asteroid, up to ten meters in diameter, into an orbit around the Moon. The alternative, Option B, would use a robotic spacecraft to grab a boulder a few meters across from a larger asteroid and move that into lunar orbit.

“One of the main things I’m looking for is the extensibility to a martian mission,” Lightfoot said. Hardware proposed for ARM under each option should also be applicable for missions to the moons of Mars or even the martian surface itself, he said. “I want to build as little ‘one-offs’ as we can.”

Another factor will be potential commercial partnership opportunities for the mission. That would include, Lightfoot said, “commercial entities coming in to either help us do this or even take advantage of it once we’ve done it.” Other major factors he said he will consider are the technical and budgetary risks of each option.

Spacenews.com:
NASA To Weigh Several Factors in Decision on Asteroid Mission Option, Jeff Foust