Related papers: Optimal impact strategies for asteroid deflection
Directed energy for planetary defense is now a viable option and is superior in many ways to other proposed technologies, being able to defend the Earth against all known threats. This paper presents basic ideas behind a directed energy…
Performance degradation due to target deviation by, for example, drift or jitter, presents a significant issue to inter-satellite laser communications. In particular, with periodic acquisition for positioning the satellite receiver,…
Asteroid exploration has been attracting more attention in recent years. Nevertheless, we have just visited tens of asteroids while we have discovered more than one million bodies. As our current observation and knowledge should be biased,…
We present a novel empirical method for correcting asteroid phase curves for rotational and geometrical effects using precomputed spin-and-shape models. Our approach normalizes sparse photometric data to a pole-on geometry, enabling…
A comprehensive characterization of the detection efficiency of nine of the major asteroid surveys that have been active over the past two decades is presented. The detection efficiency is estimated on a nightly basis by comparing the…
This study presents a fast nonlinear programming algorithm for low-thrust multi-asteroid rendezvous missions. The core contribution is the derivation of analytical formulations for both first- and second-order gradients of low-thrust…
An asteroid impact is a low probability event with potentially devastating consequences. The Asteroid Risk Mitigation Optimization and Research (ARMOR) software tool calculates whether a colliding asteroid experiences an airburst or surface…
This study investigates the different novel forms of the dynamical equations of a particle orbiting a rotating asteroid and the effective potential, the Jacobi integral, etc. on different manifolds. Nine new forms of the dynamical equations…
The Gravity Tractor (GT) is a fully controlled asteroid deflection concept using the mutual gravity between a robotic spacecraft and an asteroid to slowly accelerate the asteroid in the direction of the "hovering" spacecraft. Based on early…
We propose an adaptation of the semilinear algorithm for the prediction of the impact corridor on ground of an Earth-impacting asteroid. The proposed algorithm provides an efficient tool, able to reliably predict the impact regions at fixed…
Variational optimization of orbitals in time-independent density functional calculations of excited electronic states presents a significant challenge, as excited states typically correspond to saddle points on the electronic energy…
Estimating the probability of collision between spacecraft is crucial for risk management and collision-avoidance strategies. Current methods often rely on Gaussian assumptions and simplifications, which can be inaccurate in highly…
About 10% of the observed asteroids have rotational periods lower than P = 3 h and they seem to be relatively close to the spin barrier. Yet, the rotation has often been neglected in simulations of asteroid collisions. To determine the…
The discretization of optimal transport problems often leads to large linear programs with sparse solutions. We derive error estimates for the approximation of the problem using convex combinations of Dirac measures and devise an active-set…
Contraction analysis considers the distance between two adjacent trajectories. If this distance is contracting, then trajectories have the same long-term behavior. The main advantage of this analysis is that it is independent of the…
Satellite conjunctions involving near misses of space objects are increasingly common, especially with the growth of satellite constellations and space debris. Accurate risk analysis for these events is essential to prevent collisions and…
Asteroids can be eclipsed by other bodies in the Solar System, but no direct observation of an asteroid eclipse has been reported to date. We describe a statistical method to predict an eclipse for an asteroid based on the analysis of the…
The research about asteroids attracts more and more attention recently, especially focusing on their physical structures, such as the spin axis, the rotation period and the shape. The long distance between Earth observers and asteroids…
This paper presents the development and evaluation of an optimization-based autonomous trajectory planning algorithm for the asteroid reconnaissance phase of a deep-space exploration mission. The reconnaissance phase is a low-altitude flyby…
Asteroids that could collide with the Earth are listed on the publicly available Near-Earth object (NEO) hazard web sites maintained by the US and European space agencies (NASA and ESA). The impact probability distribution of 69 potentially…