A robotic spacecraft shaped like a butterfly with a camper van-sized body, parked on an asteroid, will be humankind’s latest outpost for interplanetary exploration.
University of Colorado engineers are teaming with the United Arab Emirates — again — to build the spacecraft and launch it in 2028 when Venus and the Earth align. The mission requires sling-shotting the craft around Venus to gain momentum and reach the asteroid 350 million miles away.
The goal is to understand materials that make up the solar system by probing 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid rock, and then determine where water could be found to allow future travel between planets, CU engineer and program manager Pete Withnell said.
“Water is life-enabling for humans. It also can be turned into fuel. If we have access to water, whether on the moon, Mars, or the asteroids, it will enable human exploration beyond Earth,” Withnell said.
“Any scientific understanding we can have of our environment, which includes the solar system, enables us to be a better space-faring species — which could enable us to leave some day,” he said. “If Earth is going to become an increasingly hostile place, that may become necessary in order to continue.”
What this cube on the asteroids will measure isn’t fully set. It’ll be loaded with solar panels, antennas and sensors, which researchers say will use infra-red technology to analyze rock and thermal instruments to measure temperatures.
Previously, a UAE team of 200 along with 150 U.S. researchers, based at CU-Boulder labs, built and designed UAE’s $200 million Amal (Hope) Mars spacecraft, which was launched from Japan in July 2020. It reached Mars in February and has been transmitting weather, dust storm and other data from different levels of the Martian atmosphere.
Emirates leaders have declared they’ll also send an unmanned spacecraft to the moon in 2024 and establish a human colony on Mars by 2117. Meantime, they’re focusing on building up a space-related economy.
UAE hopes the project with CU will help their push to create a vibrant private sector around space science, Sarah Al-Amiri, chair of the UAE Space Agency, said.
“We see space as a tremendous commercial opportunity for energetic young dreamers, thinkers and doers around the world to converge here in the Emirates,” Al-Amiri said.
The CU-UAE partnership began eight years ago after UAE leaders conducted a search of universities seeking a partner for a knowledge transfer program and settled on CU and its LASP, which was founded in 1948, a decade before NASA, and has sent instruments to eight planets including Pluto.
The United Arab Emirates (pop. 9.8 million) is a South Carolina-sized desert nation along the Persian Gulf, home to Abu Dhabi and Dubai, that has amassed wealth from global finance and exporting oil.
“They’re a country that primarily relies on the export of minerals, but this is not a sustainable future for them, so they’re looking to become a knowledge-based economy,” Withnell said.
Scientists estimate 1.1 million asteroids, remnants from the formation of the solar system, circulate in the frigid area between Mars and Jupiter. They’re spaced millions of miles apart and are considered building blocks of the planets.
Putting a station on an asteroid, or hovering above with instruments anchored to the surface, would accelerate asteroids work pioneered by the European Union, Japan and United States on mostly fly-by missions. Space systems engineers say they’re only beginning to understand what resources, such as water, might be available to support deeper exploration and, ultimately, human life beyond Earth.
