Combined amateur telescopes for asteroid detection.

Copyright 2016 Robert Clark

 NASA is conducting an interesting program to get the public involved in the upcoming ORISIS-REx mission to retrieve a sample from an asteroid. It is asking amateur astronomers to make observations of known asteroids using their telescopes:

Target Asteroids!

http://www.asteroidmission.org/get-involved/target-asteroids/

 However, a slight modification of this program should allow it to also to discover unknown asteroids. This article discusses that even an 8-inch scope equipped with a CCD camera can discover new asteroids:

Hunting Asteroids From Your Backyard
By: Dennis Di Cicco | July 28, 2006

There are no hard and fast rules regarding the telescope or CCD camera needed for asteroid work. To be effective, the system should record stars as faint as 18th magnitude with a single, 4-minute exposure. Almost any CCD camera on an 8-inch telescope can do this under a clear, dark sky.

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/celestial-objects-to-watch/hunting-asteroids-from-your-backyard/

 The article discusses down to magnitude 18. But combining the observations of many of these scopes acting in concert should allow the discovery of asteroids of weaker magnitude and therefore smaller size.

 As discussed in the article, CCD's can have imaging artifacts where a pixel will show as lit but it's not really corresponding to a light photon hitting the device. Moreover, the weaker the imaging source, the more difficult it is distinguish these imaging artifacts from a real light source.

 However, since these imaging artifacts are occurring at random, the idea would be to have several of the amateur scopes from different parts of the world focused on the same spot in the sky. Then several of the scopes' CCD's registering a hit on a pixel corresponding to the same point in the sky at the same time would be taken as indicating a real light source.

 The scopes would have to have a high degree of sky location specificity and timing synchronization for this to work.

 

 Another aspect of the imaging artifacts of the CCD's is that at low imaging illumination the CCD might correctly register a lit pixel but at a later time not register it. For individual scopes used to detect asteroids, it's done by noticing the light source moving between exposures. But if the imaging light source is too weak the CCD for the scope might not register the light source the second time to detect the motion. Then in this proposal of using multiple scopes, you also need to be able to correlate a second detection by another scope as indicating the light source moved, even if this scope did not detect the light source the first time. All the information would need to be correlated at a central site for this to work.

 Then after sufficient numbers of scopes give a high level of confidence the asteroid is indeed there, larger professional telescopes could be used to confirm the detection.

 This would have importance also for planetary protection purposes since it would allow the detection of smaller asteroids.

Credit and Financial Rewards for the Discovery?
 Certainly the amateur astronomers whose scopes detected the asteroid should get credit for the discovery. But an intriguing question of financial rewards arises because of the companies such as Planetary Resources, Inc. and Deep Space Industries that are working towards returning valuable minerals from asteroids. According to this article an asteroid potentially worth $5 trillion in platinum passed nearby to Earth last year:

‘Platinum’ asteroid potentially worth $5.4 trillion to pass Earth on Sunday.
Published time: 18 Jul, 2015 11:21
https://www.rt.com/news/310170-platinum-asteroid-2011-uw-158/

 There are very many near Earth asteroids still to be discovered. Then one can imagine these coordinated amateur scopes detecting one of these highly valuable asteroids. If one of them is eventually used to recover valuable minerals should the amateur astronomers who discovered it take part in the financial rewards?

 Not an easy question but it is notable that it would increase the interest and participation of amateur astronomers in the program. In view of its potential importance for planetary defense purposes this participation should be encouraged.

   Bob Clark

The Commercial Space Approach to Beyond Low Earth Orbit Spaceflight.

Copyright 2014 Robert Clark

 The National Research Council has released a report on NASA's plans for human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit (BEO). It confirmed what many observers of the space program had already realized that NASA's current approach is unfocused and uninspiring, and most importantly unlikely to succeed:

NASA could not deliver humans to Mars, says new strategy report.
Published time: June 05, 2014 02:39
Landing humans on Mars is unattainable for NASA if the space agency’s current strategy and level of funding are not modified in the near future, according to a new congressionally-mandated report.
…
Of the three pathways to Mars that NRC suggested, two were associated with a return to the moon. A lunar landing and habitat would hone technologies that could later be employed on a Mars mission, the report said.
The Obama administration has publicly expressed distaste for continued, expensive moon landings. In outlining US space policy in 2010, President Barack Obama said, “I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before.”
The third option outlined by the report includes the Asteroid Redirect Mission, a plan still in the study phase but currently endorsed by the Obama administration.
Such a mission would send robotic spacecraft to essentially grab and re-orbit an asteroid passing near Earth, allowing astronauts to take samples of the rock.
That mission, though, is not preferred by authors of the report. Safety issues and development of “dead end” technologies render the asteroid mission inferior if NASA wants to reach Mars, it said.
The asteroid option “cannot provide the flight frequency required to maintain competence and safety,” the report posits.
http://rt.com/usa/163736-mars-nasa-funding-strategy/


 A major problem is that NASA is taking the Apollo approach to such missions, which required huge expenditures:

It’s time for NASA to abandon the Apollo mission model.
by John K. Strickland
Monday, June 23, 2014
What, then, is the opposite of the Apollo Mission model? It is the concept of a set of continuing missions designed to operate with a set of reusable space vehicles (both for crew and cargo), allowing the creation (and construction) of enduring infrastructure in specific locations in space and at surface destinations beyond low Earth orbit, using local materials, and making each subsequent mission easier, safer, and cheaper. One very critical aspect of this concept is the use of fully reusable spacecraft in an integrated cislunar transport system. Despite its name, such a cislunar system is not focused exclusively on access to the Moon, but to multiple cislunar and other inner solar system destinations. While at least one booster is about one year away from being operationally reusable, almost all spacecraft and other boosters are not, and according to some are in fact prohibited from being reused by NASA.
http://thespacereview.com/article/2537/1


  The Apollo program absorbed 5% of the federal budget at the time. This is compared to the 0.5% NASA currently gets. If NASA were funded to the same extent as during the Apollo era, it would be getting in the range of $180 billion per year(!) That's not happening.

 However, there is a way to get similar results without the huge payouts, and that is to follow the commercial space approach. Both SpaceX and Orbital Sciences were able to develop both launchers and capsules at 1/10th the cost of the usual fully-funded government projects. That's four separate systems able to cut 90% off the development costs. That is not just a coincidence.

 Detractors of commercial space have complained the name is a misnomer for they still get federal funding. However, the name you apply to it is irrelevant. What is important is the results you get for an order of magnitude lower cost. For the commercial space approach to work though the companies involved have to be convinced they can make a profit on the projects, for it involves a public and private partnership where the companies share part of the development cost, rather than it being fully government funded.

 But what BEO projects can be expected to make a profit? Well, SpaceX believes they can make a profit on making passenger flights to Mars, and the Golden Spike Company and Bigelow Aerospace believe they can make a profit by making crewed flights to the Moon. Also, Planetary Resources Inc. and Deep Space Industries believe they can make a profit on asteroid mining.

 This will be dependent though on these companies being willing and able to provide the needed funding for their part of the costs. For companies like SpaceX and Bigelow with wealthy, visionary leaders such as Elon Musk and Robert Bigelow this will likely be possible. But for the other start-up companies clearly this will depend on the size of the investment they need to make. Then a quite key fact to keep in mind is actually such missions can be accomplished at orders of magnitude lower costs than the amounts NASA estimates.

 The example of a lunar lander illuminates this quite clearly. NASA has said that we can't afford to return to the Moon because a manned lunar lander would cost $10 billion to develop. But the examples of the Masten XEUS lunar lander and the NASA Morpheus lunar lander show a manned lander actually can be developed for only a few ten's of millions of dollars in development cost. And the costs that need to be borne by the companies will be even less with the cost-sharing with government space agencies.

  I used the term "government space agencies" instead of NASA intentionally. The costs that needed to be borne by the companies would be reduced even further when more than one space agency contributed to the costs. For instance both NASA and ESA are contributing to the development of the Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser spacecraft. You could conceivably have all of NASA, ESA, JAXA, and Roscosmos contributing to the development cost of the BEO projects. Then the costs financed by the companies might only be 1/5th that of the already low commercial-space-approach development cost.

  Bob Clark