It's Mission Possible, landing on an asteroid

It is a space mission straight from the Hollywood film Armageddon.

A team of astronauts is being trained to land on an asteroid to explore its surface, search for minerals and even learn the skills they may need to destroy it should one pose a threat to Earth.

Nasa is planning to send humans further than they have ever been before by making contact with an asteroid up to three million miles away by the end of the next decade. It would take astronauts far beyond the current limit of human endeavour - the Moon, which is 239,000 miles from Earth.

Landing safely will present a significant challenge as they travel at about 50,000mph around the Sun with almost non-existent gravity.

A team of astronauts however, has started preparing for just such a mission. Among them is Major Tim Peake, a former British Army helicopter test pilot who is the first official British astronaut with the European Space Agency.

Next month they will begin a training programme that will teach them how to operate vehicles, conduct spacewalks and gather samples on the surface of an asteroid.

While the primary goal will be to learn more about the hostile environments of asteroids, the skills needed to work on their surface could prove invaluable should scientists discover one on a collision course with Earth.

Nasa is monitoring more than 400 objects with potential to hit Earth, although most are considered to be low risk.

Speaking exclusively to The Sunday Telegraph, Major Peake said: "With the technology we have available and are developing today, an asteroid mission of up to a year is definitely achievable.

"Nasa is focused on the science you can achieve as asteroids are essentially a historical record of billions of years of our universe where we can take samples from.

"These objects are also coming extremely close to Earth all the time, but we rarely hear about it. In the last year we had an asteroid come within Earth's geostationary orbit, which is closer than some satellites.

"With enough warning we would probably send a robotic mission to deflect an asteroid, but if something is spotted late and is big enough we might come into Armageddon type scenarios where we may have to look at manned missions to deflect it."

Officials at Nasa are due to announce a manned mission to an asteroid this month. In a report to be presented to the Japan Geoscience Union Meeting, they will say that Nasa hopes to launch an unmanned spacecraft that will collect samples from an asteroid by 2016, before sending a manned mission in the 2020s.

A manned mission will attempt to rendezvous with an asteroid up to three million miles from Earth. The astronauts could stay on the asteroid for up to 30 days.

The officials will say that such missions could help test technology for human missions to other planets, including Mars.

Nasa hopes that such missions will provide new scientific information about the early universe and ways of defending Earth from collisions.

This year scientists identified an asteroid more than 460ft wide that could come close enough to Earth to collide with it in 2040.

Findings by Nasa's Dawn spacecraft, released last week, revealed that about 6% of the meteorites to have hit Earth broke off a 120-mile wide asteroid called Vesta, which was found to be rich in metals and minerals including iron and magnesium.

In the movie Armageddon, a crew of astronauts and oil rig drillers plant nuclear warheads in an asteroid that is on a collision course with Earth.

Major Peake and five other astronauts will be sent to an underwater base off the coast of Florida next month, where they will spend 12 days 65ft beneath the surface of the Atlantic to simulate working in the low-gravity environment of an asteroid.

Although the training does not guarantee Major Peake a place on a mission to an asteroid, it means he could be on a shortlist if one is launched within the timescales proposed by Nasa.

During the training the astronauts will share a 43ft long by 20ft wide capsule where they will live, eat and sleep as part of the Nasa Extreme Environment Mission Operation (NEEMO).

Major Peake said: "NEEMO is as close to the real thing as we can manage on Earth.

"We will need at least 12 hours of decompression before we can resurface safely so we are sort of trapped down there, and that makes it much more realistic."

They will move around the ocean floor in vehicles much like they would on an asteroid and test equipment for tethering a spacecraft to an asteroid and collecting rock samples.