The Little Prince, who stood tall on his fictional house-sized asteroid
B612, may soon have company. Since President Obama announced last month
that NASA plans to send people to an asteroid by 2025, scientists have
been
scrambling to fill in the details. Before astronauts can embark on such
a
journey, they need to choose a destination.
Already, researchers have begun culling the list of potential
candidates.
Martin Elvis of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in
Cambridge, Mass., proposed criteria for identifying "potentially
visitable objects"
on April 28 in Brookline, Mass., at a meeting of the American
Astronomical
Society's Division on Dynamical Astronomy.
Asteroids come in a menagerie of sizes, shapes and trajectories. Some
are
little more than giant loose rubble piles, while others are densely
packed.
Though Obama's proposal didn't point to any specific destinations, Elvis
says that a worthy asteroid ought to have a few key features, including
a
slow spin rate, no problematic satellites and a solar orbit that allows
for a
long and recurring launch window.
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