Sunday 8 March 2015

Asteroid Redirect Mission - an animation

This animated sequence depicts an Asteroid Redirect Mission. We first see a small space station in low Earth orbit. Then we are taken to a large asteroid, similar in size to say Eros, in deep space. An unmanned mission lands on it to obtain a boulder from the asteroid's surface. This returns to a space station in high lunar orbit, set up for processing asteroid material.

After initial processing at the lunar station, some of the samples are returned to the station in Earth orbit (which has expanded slightly in the meantime) for further experimentation.





This animation is part of work for Project SPACE, a study by the British Interplanetary Society on space settlement.