Plymouth Rock: Early Human Missions to Near Earth Asteroids Using Orion Spacecraft
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the last decade, astronomers have discovered a few dozen very small asteroids whose orbits around the Sun are similar to Earth’s. Round trip missions to these asteroids are therefore much easier than to previously known Near Earth Asteroids, and roughly as easy as landing on the Moon. The authors have investigated the feasibility of conducting an asteroid mission that would complement NASA’s lunar exploration architecture, using the Orion spacecraft now being developed for lunar exploration. The proposed mission concept, dubbed Plymouth Rock, combines a pair of enhanced Orion spacecraft to provide the necessary propulsion, living space, and life support capability for two astronauts. We have concluded that the dual-Orion configuration can be modified to support deep space mission durations of five to six months. Longer missions would be more difficult due to radiation exposure, volumetric packaging limits for life support consumables, and the small habitable volume available. There are at least three opportunities between 2015 and 2030 when such a mission could be performed with the capabilities of a dual-Orion spacecraft. These occur in 2019-2020, 2028, and 2029. However, the number of opportunities will likely increase as more asteroids are discovered. All of the asteroids in question are very small, between 5 m and 50 m in diameter. Propulsion capability and mission duration are the most limiting factors in the mission design. Typical missions have reentry inertial velocities of 11.1-11.3 km/s which are compatible with Orion’s existing thermal protection systems. Mission design data for two preferred asteroid targets, 2008 EA9 and 2000 SG344 are provided.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".