I became convinced around 1990 while with General Dynamics that if you want a safe, inexpensive, and near-term path to the human exploration and colonization of Mars, there was only one way to go: Establish a manned base on Phobos (and/or Deimos) and mine the interior for ices or hydrated minerals, while you direct in real-time a global swarm of robotic rovers exposing scientific secrets on the Martian surface.

Is this mountain-size Earth-crossing asteroid the next step to Mars?
Click

One key reason is the stunning, but still obscure fact that every 2 years a launch window opens that makes it easier (energy-wise) to get to Phobos than the surface of our own Moon! But, although we currently have plenty of imagery of both Martian moons, we still aren’t quite ready to pull this off.

We need a sample-return mission from Phobos — like that planned by Russia and China (Phobos-Grunt) for launch in 2011 — or we can wait for Mother Nature to deliver a Phobos-like asteroid to our vicinity. That’s OSIRIS-Rex (Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer) which, if given final approval by NASA in summer, 2011, will target near-Earth asteroid 1999 RQ 36.

OSIRIS is About Science and Security:
Not surprisingly, NASA is officially selling OSIRIS based on its impressive science and Earth-security potential. About 1/2 kilometer wide, RQ 36 “Is a treasure trove of organic material, so it holds clues to how Earth formed and life got started,” says Joseph Nuth of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

OSIRIS would offer an interplanetary first: return of samples from an asteroid for composition analysis in labs around the world. OSIRIS would launch in 2016, acquire samples of the asteroid in 2018, and return them to Earth in 2023. What a wonderful way to celebrate the opening of the new international Space Age during the 2015 Maslow Window!!

RQ 36 is also becoming famous for its designation by NASA as a “potentially hazardous asteroid” and that it has about a 1 in a 1000 chance of hitting Earth in 2182; this probability is quite uncertain as well as far-future. But veteran planetary scientist Clark Chapman notes that if it did occur, “It would be an enormous impact, like hundreds of the biggest nuclear bombs ever built exploding at once, creating a crater maybe 10 kilometers [6.2 miles] across,” although the impact would not be civilization-threatening.

The University of Arizona to the Rescue!
According to the UA News,

Michael Drake, director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, will serve as principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx. OSIRIS-REx brings together the UA’s leadership in planetary science, Lockheed Martin’s extensive experience in sample-return mission development and operations and the Goddard Space Flight Center’s (GSFC) expertise in project management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance. The OSIRIS-REx payload includes instruments provided by the UA, GSFC, Arizona State University and the Canadian Space Agency.

Mike Drake and I came to the University of Arizona at the same time: I was a new graduate student who came over from UCLA (to work for Gerard Kuiper), and he was a new assistant professor. Now he leads the Lunar and Planetary Lab that was created and initially led by the legendary “Father of Planetary Science” Gerard Kuiper.

Does OSIRIS Relate to Phobos?
Given that history I was curious if Mike saw any scientific relation between OSIRIS and future exploration of Phobos. In his email to me, he indicated that,

OSIRIS-REx is a free standing mission competing in NASA’s New Frontiers Program. So it has no programmatic relationship with any other mission. That said, our target asteroid (RQ36 for short) is an organic-rich NEO. Phobos is also probably organic-rich. So many of our scientific objectives relating to the origin of organics that led to life might also be satisfied with a pristine sample return from Phobos.

Regarding any similarities between OSIRIS and Phobos-Grunt, Mike admitted,

I don’t know much about PHOBOS-GRUNT. However, inasmuch as it succeeds in returning a Phobos sample to Earth for study, its results could be overlapping or complementary with respect to organics … How organically clean their mission will be is unknown to me. Although both are small objects, RQ36 is in free orbit around the Sun while Phobos is obviously in an unstable orbit around Mars … So operationally a Phobos mission would be very different from OSIRIS-REx.

The Russia-China Connection:
The timing and goals of OSIRIS versus Phobos-Grunt are especially interesting because — as I suggested in my decade forecasts and also more recently — Russia and China are becoming well-positioned for a joint manned Mars exploration initiative sometime after 2015. This is an example of a world-altering event with Sputnik-like potential to trigger a new space race as we approach the 2015 Maslow Window.

However, after missing the 2009 Mars launch window, Russia is targeting a 2011 launch to Phobos and Mars; e.g., this date is repeated on The Planetary Society website in connection with their LIFE experiment. Presumably Phobos-Grunt would acquire Phobos samples by 2013, while Drake has confirmed that OSIRIS launch would not be until 2016 with samples returned to Earth in 2023. In any case, even if Phobos-Grunt slipped another launch window, it would still be expected to acquire Phobos samples well before OSIRIS was even launched.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS