Graham Warwick/WASHINGTON DC
SpaceDev has secured the first customer for its planned commercial asteroid rendezvous mission. The company has signed a $200,000 contract with Dojin to carry a package on the Near Earth Asteroid Prospector (NEAP), to rendezvous with asteroid Nereus in January 2002.
Poway, California-based SpaceDev already has a letter of intent from the University of Arizona to carry a multispectral camera on the NEAP, and is continuing efforts to interest NASA in the programme, says chairman and chief executive Jim Benson.
Commercial payload sales are not essential to the mission, Benson maintains. "If we fly two or three of our own instruments, and get two or three good data sales, we will not need any payload customers," he says. Nevertheless, the company is keen to secure clients, particularly for payloads to be ejected on to the surface of Nereus as the probe "hovers" above the asteroid.
Under its Cosmic Voyage 2000 programme, Texas-based Dojin plans to record personal data from paying customers on a CD-ROM to be carried by the NEAP and left on Nereus.
SpaceDev has reduced the NEAP's size, to cut the mission's cost from "under $50 million to less than $35 million". This followed design work conducted by the company for theJet Propulsion Laboratory on NASA's planned Mars Micromissions programme.
Originally, the NEAP was to weigh 700kg (1,550lb). The new "micro-NEAP" will weigh 200kg, but will carry half the number of payloads, possibly two onboard and two ejectable, Benson says. The design is still being finalised, and SpaceDev plans to begin work on the spacecraft in September.
The design change has eliminated the need for repeated lunar flybys to accelerate the probe, pushing back to August-November 2001 the launch window for a January 2002 rendezvous. The NEAP is intended for launch by Ariane 5 or a similar booster.
• SpaceDev and Canada's Northern Centre for Advanced Technology (NORCAT) are to collaborate on proof-of-concept development of low-gravity anchoring and drilling technologies that could be used on future commercial deep-space sampling and mining operations. Ontario-based NORCAT is also expected to help SpaceDev define the standard mechanical, electrical and data interfaces for its deep-space bus, including the NEAP.
Source: Flight International
