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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…
Low-thrust trajectories play a crucial role in optimizing scientific output and cost efficiency in asteroid belt missions. Unlike high-thrust transfers, low-thrust trajectories require solving complex optimal control problems. This…
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…
There are more than 750,000 asteroids identified in the main belt. These asteroids are diverse in composition and size. Some of these asteroids can be traced back to the early solar system and can provide insight into the origins of the…
A deep-space exploration mission with low-thrust propulsion to rendezvous with multiple asteroids is investigated. Indirect methods, based on the optimal control theory, are implemented to optimize the fuel consumption. The application of…
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…
CASTAway is a mission concept to explore our Solar System's main asteroid belt. Asteroids and comets provide a window into the formation and evolution of our Solar System and the composition of these objects can be inferred from space-based…
The preliminary mission design of spacecraft missions to asteroids often involves, in the early phases, the selection of candidate target asteroids. The final result of such an analysis is a list of asteroids, ranked with respect to the…
This paper considers the optimization problems that arise to coordinate a tandem between a mothership vehicle and a fleet of drones. %more than one drone. Each drone can be launched from the mothership to perform an operation. After…
Asteroid diameters are traditionally difficult to estimate. When a direct measurement of the diameter cannot be made through either occultation or direct radar observation, the most common method is to approximate the diameter from infrared…
Asteroid mining has been proposed as an approach to complement Earth-based supplies of rare earth metals and supplying resources in space, such as water. However, existing studies on the economic viability of asteroid mining have remained…
In unmanned space exploration, the cooperation among space robots requires advanced communication techniques. In this paper, we propose a communication optimization scheme for a specific cooperation system named the "mother-daughter…
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,…
Asteroid spectroscopy reflects surface mineralogy. There are few thousand asteroids whose surfaces have been observed spectrally. Determining the surface properties of those objects is important for many practical and scientific…
The distribution of close-in exoplanets is shaped by a complex interplay between atmospheric and dynamical processes. The Desert-Rim Exoplanets Atmosphere and Migration (DREAM) program aims at disentangling those processes through the study…
We perform statistical wavelet analysis of the Main Belt asteroids, seeking statistically significant asteroid families. The goal is to test the new wavelet analysis algorithm and to compare its results with more traditional methods like…
Exploration of asteroids and comets can give insight into the origins of the solar system and can be instrumental in planetary defence and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). Asteroids, due to their low gravity are a challenging target for…
We searched for young asteroid families -- those with ages t_age < 10 Myr and at least three members -- using the proper element catalog from Nesvorny et al. (2024). Our approach employed the Hierarchical Clustering Method (HCM) in a…
Previous work in studying interstellar exploration by one or several probes has focused primarily either on engineering models for a spacecraft targeting a single star system, or large-scale simulations to ascertain the time required for a…
Following the break up of a parent body, the Yarkovsky effect causes asteroid family members to spread in orbital semimajor axis with a rate often inversely proportional to their diameter. This size dependent semimajor axis drift causes…