Sunday 14 September 2014

Asteroid Redirect Mission - an animation

I'm currently working on a documentary on space habitats as part of the study project for the British Interplanetary Society and have completed the animation for the first section, which shows an initial Asteroid Redirect mission.

The first spacecraft is unmanned and after a gravity assist manoeuvre around Venus it proceeds to obtain the asteroid and then returns it to a high lunar orbit.

A crew capsule then departs Earth orbit to rendezvous with the first and after docking, two astronauts set out to examine the asteroid and take samples from it for further study.

The next section is going to show a mission to a much larger asteroid. This will involve collecting a boulder from the asteroid's surface and returning this to the base of operations in high lunar orbit.  These initial sections are inspired by the NASA plans for missions of this sort and if you are interested in this please look up their animations as well which are, as you might expect, very good.

The eventual finished documentary will include narration to provide further explanation. I'm really enjoying working on it!