Related papers: A New Method of Capturing and Transporting Asteroi…
The Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) proposes to retrieve a near-Earth asteroid and position it in a lunar distant retrograde orbit (DRO) for later study, crewed exploration, and ultimately resource exploitation. During the Caltech Space…
Using a fully autonomous spacecraft - Bering - we propose to detect and study sub-km asteroids from an orbit within the asteroid Main Belt. The main purpose of the proposed Bering mission is to detect a statistically significant sample of…
Asteroid mining offers the possibility to revolutionize supply of resources vital for human civilization. Preliminary analysis suggests that Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA) contain enough volatile and high value minerals to make the mining…
In recent years, the retrieval of entire asteroids has received significant attention, with many approaches leveraging the invariant manifolds of the Circular-Restricted Three-body Problem to capture an asteroid into a periodic orbit about…
The bulk density of an asteroid informs us about its interior structure and composition. To constrain the bulk density one needs an estimate for the mass of the asteroid. The mass is estimated by analyzing an asteroid's gravitational…
<abridged> NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) has been proposed with the aim to capture a small asteroid a few meters in size and redirect it into an orbit around the Moon. There it can be investigated at leisure by astronauts aboard an…
We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of using a satellite-based sensor with visual and infrared focal plane arrays to search for NEAs with orbits largely interior to the Earth's orbit. Such a space-based system could detect…
Estimates for asteroid masses are based on their gravitational perturbations on the orbits of other objects such as Mars, spacecraft, or other asteroids and/or their satellites. In the case of asteroid-asteroid perturbations, this leads to…
One of the main bottleneck in assessing the accuracy of Mars orbit is the unknown value of the asteroids in the Main Asteroid Belt. Nowadays a modeling with 343 asteroids as point masses is used, with the relative masses fitted to…
We propose to use a modest fraction of the re-purposed Kepler mission time and apertures to greatly increase the quantity and quality of our knowledge of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) rotation and shape. NEAs are important for understanding…
We present a method for calculating precise distances to asteroids using only two nights of data from a single location --- far too little for an orbit --- by exploiting the angular reflex motion of the asteroids due to Earth's axial…
This paper outlines the Radio Science Experiment (RSE) proposed for the RAMSES mission to asteroid (99942) Apophis, which will undergo a close Earth encounter in April 2029. This event provides a unique opportunity to study the asteroid's…
Understanding the dynamical evolution of asteroids through the secular Yarkovsky effect requires the determination of many physical properties, including the rotation period. We propose a method aimed at obtaining a robust determination of…
The number of ore-bearing asteroids could well be small and remote telescopic techniques are inadequate to identify such asteroids confidently. Finding an asteroid that can be profitably mined requires proximate observations from assay…
This study evaluates a technique for determining the mass of a potentially hazardous asteroid from a high-speed flyby in the context of a rapid reconnaissance planetary defense scenario. We consider a host spacecraft that dispenses a small…
Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) measurements are crucial for advanced exploration of the laws of fundamental gravitational physics and geophysics. Current LLR technology allows us to measure distances to the Moon with a precision approaching 1…
Asteroid mining can become an enabling technology to establish a sustainable manned colony on Mars, which requires metallic materials more often than they are readily available in shipments from Earth. This paper describes a feasibility…
Deflecting an asteroid from an Earth impact trajectory requires only small velocity changes, typically of the order of microns per second, if done many years ahead of time. For this, a highly precise method of determining the need,…
The exploration of small body asteroids provides direct access to the primitive building blocks of our solar system. Sample and return missions enable chemical and radioisotope studies which not only provide evidence for the formation of…
We determine the possible detection rate of asteroids with the Bering mission. In particular we examine the outcome of the Bering mission in relation to the populations of Near-Earth Asteroids and main belt asteroids. This is done by…