Related papers: Precautionary Planetary Defence
Among the currently known Near Earth Objects (NEOs), roughly 1400 are classified as being potentially hazardous asteroids. The recent Chelyabinsk event has shown that these objects can pose a real threat to mankind. We illustrate that high…
Correctly evaluating defenses against adversarial examples has proven to be extremely difficult. Despite the significant amount of recent work attempting to design defenses that withstand adaptive attacks, few have succeeded; most papers…
Time is arguably the key limiting factor for interstellar exploration. At high speeds, flyby missions to nearby stars by laser propelled wafersats taking 50-100 years would be feasible. Directed energy launch systems could accelerate on the…
The possibility that extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs) could be hostile to humanity has been raised as a reason to avoid even trying to contact ETIs. However, there is a distinct shortage of analytical discussion about the risks of an…
This paper investigates the mission planning problem for spacecraft confronting orbital debris to achieve autonomous avoidance. Firstly, combined with the avoidance requirements, a closed-loop framework of autonomous avoidance for orbital…
The prioritization and improvement of ethics, planetary protection, and safety standards in the astro-sciences is the most critical priority as our scientific and exploratory capabilities progress, both within government agencies and the…
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…
The 99942 Apophis close encounter with Earth in 2029 may provide information about asteroid's physical characteristics and measurements of Earth's effects on the asteroid surface. In this work, we analysed the surface and the nearby…
In the last few years, a number of planets have been proposed to orbit several post main-sequence binary star systems on the basis of observed variations in the timing of eclipses between the binary components. A common feature of these…
Close planetary flybys are frequently employed as a technique to place spacecraft on extreme solar system trajectories that would otherwise require much larger booster vehicles or may not even be feasible when relying solely on chemical…
The global climate crisis poses new risks to humanity, and with them, new challenges to the practices of professional astronomy. Avoiding the more catastrophic consequences of global warming by more than 1.5 degrees requires an immediate…
Several technologies have been proposed for deflecting a hazardous Solar System object on a trajectory that would otherwise impact the Earth. The effectiveness of each technology depends on several characteristics of the given object,…
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 strategy for control of a spacecraft docking with a non-maneuvering target in the presence of safety constraints and bounded disturbances. The presence of disturbances prevents convergence to a unique docking state, so…
The post-main sequence eclipsing binary NN Serpentis was recently announced as the potential host of at least two massive planetary companions. In that work, the authors put forward two potential architectures that fit the observations of…
Stellar activity has a particularly strong influence on planets at small orbital distances, such as close-in exoplanets. For such planets, we present two extreme cases of stellar variability, namely stellar coronal mass ejections and…
The method of defensive forecasting is applied to the problem of prediction with expert advice for binary outcomes. It turns out that defensive forecasting is not only competitive with the Aggregating Algorithm but also handles the case of…
The METI risk problem refers to the uncertain outcome of sending transmissions into space with the intention of messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence (METI). Here, I demonstrate that this uncertainty is undecidable by proving that that…
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…
This paper presents the design of a multi-spacecraft system for the deflection of asteroids. Each spacecraft is equipped with a fibre laser and a solar concentrator. The laser induces the sublimation of a portion of the surface of the…