Space: 'Plymouth Rock' Asteroid Mission Idea Gains Ground

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bystander
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Space: 'Plymouth Rock' Asteroid Mission Idea Gains Ground

Post by bystander » Mon Aug 30, 2010 8:58 pm

'Plymouth Rock' Deep Space Asteroid Mission Idea Gains Ground
Space.com | 30 Aug 2010
Plans for sending humans to visit an asteroid are heating up, with at least one company already scoping out the technological essentials for a deep space expedition within a decade, given the go-ahead.

The asteroid space trek is seen as both scientifically valuable and as a dress rehearsal for a Mars mission, NASA officials have said. It could also hone ideas for planetary defense to guard Earth from a messy head-on clash with a space rock.

Launching a manned asteroid mission by 2025 is NASA's new goal set by President Barack Obama, who announced the plan in April. The deep space mission would serve as a stepping stone to a crewed mission to Mars in the mid-2030s, he said.

Lockheed Martin, which has been building NASA's Orion space capsule to replace the agency's retiring shuttle fleet, has already completed a study on how an asteroid mission might work.

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Re: Space: 'Plymouth Rock' Asteroid Mission Idea Gains Groun

Post by neufer » Mon Aug 30, 2010 9:29 pm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_Rock wrote:
<<Plymouth Rock is the traditional site of disembarkation of William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims who founded Plymouth Colony in 1620. [However,] the first written reference to the Pilgrims landing on a rock is found 121 years after they landed.

In 1835 Alexis De Tocqueville, a French author traveling throughout the United States, wrote:
  • "This Rock has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns in the Union. Does this sufficiently show that all human power and greatness is in the soul of man? Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant; and the stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation; its very dust is shared as a relic."
Plymouth Rock has figured prominently in Native American politics in the United States, particularly as a symbol of the wars waged soon after the Pilgrims' landing. It has been ceremoniously buried twice by Native American rights activists, once in 1970 and again in 1995, as part of National Day of Mourning protests. Cole Porter - in the eponymous title song to the 1934 musical Anything Goes - imagined the Rock landing on any Puritans who might try to reverse newly-gained social freedoms of the 20th century.>>
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zJ3vqkX ... re=related[/youtube]
Art Neuendorffer

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