NASA Administrator Charles Bolden inspected the prototype of a futuristic "ion engine" that will be used in the mission to capture an asteroid and transport it near the Moon around 2019.
Ion engines have been used in recent years on several unmanned missions, such as NASA's Dawn mission exploring the asteroid Hestia and the dwarf planet Ceres.
Unlike rocket engines, which offer high propulsive power but operate for a short time, ion engines operate for many months continuously and emit a steady but weak jet of charged atoms.
In other words, ion engines provide small bursts of acceleration over a long period of time, rather than large bursts lasting only a few minutes. Since they consume small amounts of gas and remain operational for thousands of hours, the ship's top speed can be truly high.
The NEXT engine being developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Charles Bolden visited on Thursday, emits a bluish jet of xenon ions.
NASA's Charles Bolden (right) during his visit to JPL (Source: AP)
According to the strategy set out by the White House in 2009, NASA will send astronauts to an asteroid, which has not yet been selected, as a springboard for the first manned mission to Mars.
But instead of sending the crew on a long journey to the asteroid's vicinity, NASA decided to first send a robotic craft that would capture it and park it in the neighborhood of the Moon. In the next phase, scheduled for 2021, NASA astronauts will use the new Orion capsule to visit the space rock and collect samples.
In addition to preparing NASA for a manned mission to Mars in the 2030s, the asteroid abduction would also allow testing of technologies that could intercept a space rock threatening Earth.
The asteroid that will be transported to the Moon will be small enough not to threaten the planet. Even if it were accidentally on a collision course, it would burn up in the atmosphere.
The cost of the kidnapping operation and sending astronauts to the asteroid is estimated at around $2.6 billion.
