Astronauts visit an asteroid in this Lockheed Martin illustration
Senior officials from NASA and the space agencies of nine other nations gathered in Kyoto, Japan on Tuesday to shape a coordinated multinational strategy for space exploration called the Global Exploration Roadmap.
The planning, under way for a year, identifies the International Space Station as the starting point for an eventual human mission to Mars. It explores two gateways, the moon or an asteroid.
The meeting of the International Space Exploration Coordination Group included representatives from Canada, Europe, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Russia and the United Kingdom, as well as the United States.
In the U. S., President Obama and Congress have identified an “Asteroid Next” strategy that would send astronauts to a yet-to-be-identified “Near Earth Object” by 2015. Explorers would aim for missions to the Martian moons in the 2035 time frame and Mars, itself, soon after. The strategy was presented last year, after the White House cancelled NASA’s previous strategy to return explorers to the moon because of its high cost.
Each of the new ISECG roadmap options represents a 25-year course of robotic and human exploration.
Astronauts explore the moon's South Pole in this NASA illustration.
The first draft of the roadmap will attempt to focus the planning currently underway in each of the space agencies in the areas of robotics, advanced technology and use of the space station as a test bed for exploration. The Kyoto participants plan to finish the first draft of the Global Exploration Roadmap in a few weeks and make the contents public.
“We are very happy with the progress of the Global Exploration Roadmap to technically coordinate both near and long term space exploration planning, with world space agencies.” said Yoshiyuki Hasagawa of Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency, the ISECG chairman, in a statement.
“NASA is confident that the release of this product, and subsequent refinements as circumstances within each space agency evolve, will facilitate the ability of space agencies to form the partnerships that will ensure robust and sustainable human exploration,” added Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s recently named Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations and the previous ISECG chair.
Participation is considered non binding for each of the nations.
But the cooperative efforts are intended to encourage partnerships in exploration that will eventually open planetary destinations where humans can one day live and work.