A reason to go to Mars

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 12:49 AM, Schonert Edward
wrote:
(...)
> http://clowder.net/hop/railroad/railroad.html
> Looks to me like least elliptical NEA orbits still go from ~1AU to >2AU
> from sun. To reach this orbit would require a far > delta v than reaching
> Mars's orbit, right?
(...)

Wrong. There are thousands of NEOs with a wide distribution of orbits,
and the delta-v for reaching some of them is less than the values for
reaching the Moon or Mars. And even not considering those most
favorable cases, there are entire clusters of NEOs with orbits around
1AU (see http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/groups.html), so your picture of
all NEOs having highly elliptical orbits going beyond 2AU does not
correspond to reality.