NASA wants to put somebody on an asteroid by 2025 because they don’t know how else to get people’s attention. And to succeed in this entirely worthwhile endeavour, they’ve designed a mechanism by which to harpoon asteroids, so that vehicles can land on the thing despite the weakened gravity. Call me Ishmael.
To be fair to NASA, the we-should-land-on-an-asteroid thing isn’t totally pointless – it’s part of NASA’s initiative to update its survey of near-earth asteroids, which is pretty important. In the sense that it would be nice to know if a giant rock was hurtling through space, intent on crushing us. And I honestly don’t need them to justify why it is that they’ve decided to land on an asteroid with a space harpoon gun, because that’s cool.
Alternatively they might have to lasso the thing – because the asteroid might be made of too dense a rock to harpoon – but that made a less attractive headline. Have a good weekend.
[Source: Popular Mechanics]
