Related papers: Parameter-space study of kinetic-impactor mission …
International and U.S. strategies and protocols have identified the need to develop rapid-response spacecraft reconnaissance capabilities as a priority to advance planetary defense readiness. A space-based reconnaissance response is…
Preliminary mission design requires an efficient and accurate approximation to the low-thrust rendezvous trajectories, which might be generally three-dimensional and involve multiple revolutions. In this paper, a new shaping method using…
Over 34,000 objects bigger than 10 cm in length are known to orbit Earth. Among them, only a small percentage are active satellites, while the rest of the population is made of dead satellites, rocket bodies, and debris that pose a…
Constraining the many biological parameters that govern cortical dynamics is computationally and conceptually difficult because of the curse of dimensionality. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing (1) a novel data-informed…
By varying a parameter of a one-dimensional piecewise smooth map, stable periodic orbits are observed. In this paper, complete analytic characterization of these stable periodic orbits is obtained. An interesting relationship between the…
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…
The aim of this paper is to numerically investigate the orbital dynamics of the circular planar restricted problem of five bodies. By numerically integrating several large sets of initial conditions of orbits we classify them into three…
Planetary debris is observed in the atmospheres of over 1,000 white dwarfs, and two white dwarfs are now observed to contain orbiting minor planets. Exoasteroids and planetary core fragments achieve orbits close to the white dwarf through…
The proposal of increasingly complex and innovative space endeavours poses growing demands for mission designers. In order to meet the established requirements and constraints while maintaining a low fuel cost, the use of low-energy…
Collisional threats posed by Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are increasingly being confirmed by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and European Space Agency (ESA) sky surveys. Efforts to develop tools to perform modelling,…
The computation of the Minimum Orbital Intersection Distance (MOID) is an old, but increasingly relevant problem. Fast and precise methods for MOID computation are needed to select potentially hazardous asteroids from a large catalogue. The…
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…
Recent investigations (e.g. Han et al. 2001) have shown that fitting the Hipparcos observations with an orbital model when the astrometric wobble caused by the companion is below the noise level can have rather unexpected consequences. With…
We provide a fast method for computing constraints on impactor pre-impact orbits, applying this to the late giant impacts in the Solar System. These constraints can be used to make quick, broad comparisons of different collision scenarios,…
The space environment around the Earth is populated by more than 130 million objects of 1 mm in size and larger, and future predictions shows that this amount is destined to increase, even if mitigation measures are implemented at a far…
For the classical N-body problem, an approach is proposed based on the introduction of some natural in the physical sense optimization problems of mathematical programming for finding a conditional minimum for the characteristics of the…
An analytical formulation for collision avoidance maneuvers involving a spacecraft and a space debris is presented, including solutions for the maximum deviation and minimum collision probability cases. Gauss' planetary equations and…
Analytical approximations are commonly employed in the initial trajectory design phase of a mission to rapidly explore a broad design space. In the context of an asteroid deflection mission, accurately predicting deflection is crucial to…
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…
Small asteroids and large meteoroids frequently impact the Earth, though their physical and material properties remain poorly understood. When observed as fireballs in Earth's atmosphere, these properties can be inferred from their ablation…