Manned Asteroid Flyby Mission (1966)

Asteroids often arouse fear when they should really arouse fascination. Relics of the early Solar System, they contain clues to the formation of the planets. In 1966, a Northrop Space Laboratories engineer proposed a piloted flyby of the near-Earth asteroid Eros to prepare astronauts for Mars. Space historian David S. F. Portree describes this early plan for a manned asteroid mission.

Image: NASA.
German astronomer Gustav Witt discovered the asteroid Eros on August 13, 1898. Eros is both the first asteroid found to orbit entirely outside of the Asteroid Belt and the first known planet-crosser; its path crosses the orbit of Mars. Eros orbits the Sun in a little more than 643 days. Eros and Earth pass nearest each other – about 14 million miles apart – every 81 years.
In March 1966, Eugene Smith, an engineer at Northrop Space Laboratories in Hawthorne, California, presented a paper outlining a piloted Eros flyby mission at the Third Space Congress in Cocoa, Florida. In it, he wrote that Eros exploration might help scientists understand Main Belt asteroids and small planetary moons (for example, the martian satellites Deimos and Phobos). He noted that Eros would pass within 14 million miles of Earth on ...