Asteroid capture plan continues to receive criticism from scientists

Science : Many of the planetary scientists who attended a workshop to address NASA’s proposed mission to capture a small asteroid expressed concerns about the project. Originally proposed by NASA in President Obama’s 2014 budget, the plan calls for sending a spacecraft to grab an asteroid from the asteroid belt and bring it into Earth orbit. At yesterday’s Target NEO 2: Open Community Workshop , held in Washington, DC, several planetary scientists reiterated the community’s earlier concerns and raised new ones. The primary complaints are that NASA did not consult with the wider planetary and asteroid science community; that a suitable target asteroid is unlikely to be found in time to meet the schedule NASA laid out for its Asteroid Retrieval Mission; that the design of the craft is too nebulous because of too many unknowns about the mission and target; and that a 2017 or 2018 launch doesn’t give NASA enough time to design, build, and test all the necessary systems for a new spacecraft. Whether the plan will receive funding from Congress is unknown, but even if it does, the future of the program remains unclear.