Related papers: Precautionary Planetary Defence
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…
There is considerable uncertainty about what properties, capabilities and motivations future AGIs will have. In some plausible scenarios, AGIs may pose security risks arising from accidents and defects. In order to mitigate these risks,…
Orbit-determination programs find the orbit solution that best fits a set of observations by minimizing the RMS of the residuals of the fit. For near-Earth asteroids, the uncertainty of the orbit solution may be compatible with trajectories…
The proliferation of space debris in LEO has become a major concern for the space industry. With the growing interest in space exploration, the prediction of potential collisions between objects in orbit has become a crucial issue. It is…
One of the mainstays of the controversial "rare Earth" hypothesis is the "Goldilocks problem" regarding various parameters describing a habitable planet, partially involving the role of mass extinctions and other catastrophic processes in…
Some have claimed that the future development of powerful AI systems would enable the United States to shift the international balance of power dramatically in its favor. Such a feat may not be technically possible; even so, if American AI…
The recent growing interest in small solar system bodies such as asteroids and comets for scientific inspection, exploitation of resources, and planetary defense reasons is pushing the development of innovative engineering solutions to…
The exponential increase in orbital debris and active satellites will lead to congested orbits, necessitating more frequent collision avoidance maneuvers by satellites. To minimize fuel consumption while ensuring the safety of satellites,…
A large fraction of stars are formed in dense clusters. In the cluster, close encounters between stars at distances less than 100 au are common. It has been shown that during close encounters planets can transfer between stars. Such…
We specify the range to which perturbations penetrate a planetesimal system. Such perturbations can originate from massive planets or from encounters with other stars. The latter can have an origin in the star cluster in which the planetary…
Extrasolar multiple-planet systems provide valuable opportunities for testing theories of planet formation and evolution. The architectures of the known multiple-planet systems demonstrate a fascinating level of diversity, which motivates…
Context: Potentially hazardous asteroids (PHA) in Earth-crossing orbits pose a constant threat to life on Earth. Several mitigation methods have been proposed, and the most feasible technique appears to be the disintegration of the impactor…
We have investigated the probability of temporary capture of asteroids in eccentric orbits by a planet in a circular or an eccentric orbit through analytical and numerical calculations. We found that in the limit of the circular orbit, the…
The security of cyber-physical systems is first and foremost a safety problem, yet it is typically handled as a traditional security problem, which means that solutions are based on defending against threats and are often implemented too…
Over the last decades, space has grown from a purely scientific struggle, fueled by the desire to demonstrate superiority of one regime over the other, to an anchor point of the economies of essentially all developed countries. Many…
There has been increasing awareness of the difficulties in reaching and extracting people from mass casualty scenarios, such as those arising from natural disasters. While platforms have been designed to consider reaching casualties and…
Variational techniques have been used in applications of hydrodynamics in special cases but an action that is general enough to deal with both potential flows and solid-body flows, such as cylindrical Couette flow and rotating planets, has…
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…
About 10% of the observed asteroids have rotational periods lower than P = 3 h and they seem to be relatively close to the spin barrier. Yet, the rotation has often been neglected in simulations of asteroid collisions. To determine the…
Performing orbital insertion around Mars using aerocapture instead of a propulsive orbit insertion manoeuvre allows to save resources and/or increase the payload mass fraction. Aerocapture has never been employed to date because of the high…