THEY’RE obscure, small and airless: who’d want to visit an asteroid? NASA astronauts might, because taking a trip to some nearby space rocks could help them learn how to fly to Mars.
That’s the view of the committee appointed by the White House to review NASA’s aims, said committee member Edward Crawley of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at a public meeting last week in Cocoa Beach, Florida. The idea is to send astronauts on progressively longer space trips – including visits to asteroids and fly-bys of Venus – to prepare for a landing on Mars.
The first mission would fly by…
