Interview: Italy, U.S. in talks on joint asteroid mission: Italian Space Agency

Italy and the United States are in talks on a possible joint asteroid mission, Enrico Flamini, scientific coordinator of the Italian Space Agency (ASI), said on Thursday.

A day after Luxembourg launched an official initiative to promote the mining of asteroids for minerals, Flamini said "the big issue around space exploration for most advanced space agencies and nations in the world is that of the perspective of a mission to Mars in the medium-long term."

The exploitation of raw materials on asteroids, he elaborated, is among the strategies put in place to reach this objective, besides paving the way for exploiting asteroids for metals and other materials that are scarce on Earth but plentiful in near-Earth objects (NEOs).

"Presently, we see U.S. space agency NASA as particularly advanced as regards the possibility of a joint asteroid mission and we are in talks to try to understand how, when and through which modalities this could be done," Flamini told Xinhua.

The general idea, he added, would be to first send robots on an asteroid mission and later humans, and bring a significant quantity of mineral samples back to Earth, in anticipation of a longer mission to Mars in the future.

However, Flamini specified, "no concrete steps have been made yet in our ongoing talks with NASA as such a plan requires a very long studying phase."

"This is why a decision on how to proceed cannot be taken before one year from now," he pointed out.

Flamini underlined that Italy has a long-standing space industry as a considerable part of the habitable volume of the International Space Station (ISS), and a country with strong technological know-how as regards the instruments to sample and analyze minerals.

But a possible future mission to Mars, according to Flamini, would require such a huge technological effort that it could not be carried out by one single nation.

"Human space exploration is something different from launching a satellite into orbit around the Earth. It can only be an international mission, an achievement of humankind," he said.

For this reason, all advanced nations need to cooperate to put together their different backgrounds and expertise in the space sector in order to reach this common objective.

Besides collaborating with the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, Italy also has "excellent relations" with the China National Space Administration (CNSA), said Flamini.

"Italy and China have found a common language," he stated.

Flamini cited the example of Italian and Chinese researchers working together since 2004 to develop the instruments on board the CSES mission (China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite) which will study the phenomena of an electromagnetic nature.

He said he hopes bilateral cooperation would further increase in the space sector and foster the development of international space exploration. Endit