Nasa plan to 'lasso' asteroid and turn it into a 'space station

[Deleted Orbinaut]

Yea, sounds small, but we're still talking about 300 to 400 metric tons. Not sure there's anything currently in existence capable of supplying the required delta-v.

The Apollo C/SM (Isp=314s; empty weight = 12 tons; fuel weight = 19 tons) could supply about 180 m/s of delta-V to an asteroid that large. I suspect if you nudged the right asteroid far enough away, it wouldn't take much to get a lunar fly-by. As for capture, if an object were to enter Earth's SOI with 0 excess velocity, it would fall parabolically toward the Earth, attaining a speed of about 1.4 km/s when it reached the moon's altitude. The moon is travelling about 1 km/s, so if the object entered the moon's SOI from directly retrograde, it would have about 400 m/s excess velocity relative to the moon, and this orbit could be closed around the moon at a near periapsis (~30km) for less than 10 m/s and circularized for about 600 m/s.

 

[N_Molson]

Yea, sounds small, but we're still talking about 300 to 400 metric tons. Not sure there's anything currently in existence capable of supplying the required delta-v.

They are going to use ionic/plasma engines if I understand well. So the idea would be to shape slowly but surely the asteroid orbit to match the desired orbit (probably over several months/years).

The "tug" would look like this :

300-400 tons is fairly heavy to deal with. Surely they could find a better target somewhere out there for something like this?

Problem is, as statickid shows on his nice drawing, that if you catch anything smaller, it won't be very interesting...