Related papers: Dealing with Uncertainties in Asteroid Deflection …
In Epoch 2 of the 2024 PDC25 Hypothetical Asteroid Impact Scenario, an asteroid is confirmed to be on a collision course with the Earth, and its size and surface composition have been well characterized via a flyby mission. A kinetic…
We present a novel concept to impart a continuous thrust to an Earth threatening asteroid from a hovering spacecraft without need for physical attachment nor gravitational interaction with the asteroid. The concept involves an ion thruster…
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,…
Thermophysical models allow for improved constraints on the physical and thermal surface properties of asteroids beyond what can be inferred from more simple thermal modeling, provided a sufficient number of observations is available. We…
A realistic mission scenario for the deflection of fictitious asteroid 2015PDC is investigated that makes use of the ion beam shepherd concept as primary deflection technique. The article deals with the design of a low thrust rendezvous…
While no known asteroid poses a threat to Earth for at least the next century, the catalog of near-Earth asteroids is incomplete for objects whose impacts would produce regional devastation. Several approaches have been proposed to…
We assess the risk of an Earth impact for asteroid (99942) Apophis by means of a statistical analysis accounting for the uncertainty of both the orbital solution and the Yarkovsky effect. We select those observations with either rigorous…
This article investigates reconstructing the internal mass density of a numerical asteroid model using the gradient of a simulated gravity field as synthetic measurement data. Our goal is to advance the mathematical inversion methodology…
Tumbling asteroids belong to a small group of objects, whose angular velocity vector is unaligned with any of its principal axes of inertia. This leads to challenging efforts to model the trajectory of any spacecraft designed to orbit these…
Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST), with a powerful sky survey capability in the northern hemisphere, will play an important role in asteroid searching and monitoring. However, WFST is not a telescope dedicated to near-Earth asteroids…
In 2029, the near-Earth asteroid (99942) Apophis approaches the Earth within six Earth radii. This opportunity is one of the rarest natural experiments that we can use to better characterize a small body through telescopic observations and…
The catalog of km-sized near-Earth objects (NEOs) is nearly complete. Typical impact monitoring analyses search for possible impacts over the next 100 years and none of the km-sized objects represent an impact threat over that time…
Asteroid impacts pose a major threat to all life on Earth. The age of the dinosaurs was abruptly ended by a 10-km-diameter asteroid. Currently, a nuclear device is the only means of deflecting large Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs)…
Hazardous asteroid has been one of the concerns for humankind as fallen asteroid on earth could cost a huge impact on the society.Monitoring these objects could help predict future impact events, but such efforts are hindered by the large…
A method for asteroid deflection that makes use of a spacecraft moving back and forth on a segment of a Keplerian orbit about the asteroid is studied with the aim of optimizing the initial gross mass of the spacecraft. The corresponding…
This paper presents a novel approach to the robust design of deflection actions for Near Earth Objects (NEO). In particular, the case of deflection by means of Solar-pumped Laser ablation is studied here in detail. The basic idea behind…
The Near Earth Object Surveyor mission has a requirement to find two-thirds of the potentially hazardous asteroids larger than 140 meters in size. In order to determine the mission's expected progress toward this goal during design and…
Close-proximity exploration of small celestial bodies is crucial for the comprehensive and accurate characterization of their properties. However, the complex and uncertain dynamical environment around them contributes to a rapid dispersion…
We define a set of procedures to numerically study the fate of ejecta produced by the impact of an artificial projectile with the aim of deflecting an asteroid. Here we develop a simplified, idealized model of impact conditions that can be…
In this article, theory-based analytical methodologies of astrophysics employed in the modern era are suitably operated alongside a test research-grade telescope to image and determine the orbit of a near-earth asteroid from original…