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Asteroid Target Selection and Orbital Manipulation Sensitivity for Deflection Demonstration Missions

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Abstract

In recent years, space agencies have begun to seriously consider launching demonstration missions to test some of the asteroid orbital deflection technologies and methods that have been studied and discussed in the scientific literature. Consequently, several mission studies have already been carried out. This paper attempts to gain new insights into the target selection process by analyzing the orbital evolution of a large set of notional accessible asteroids that cover all types of Near Earth Object families. The evolution of their unperturbed orbits and their anthropogenically modified trajectories was compared, and a measure of the resilience of a given orbit to anthropogenic manipulation was taken (i.e., orbital innocuity). The results show that pruning criteria such as considering only Amor objects (i.e., non-Earth-crossers) reduce unnecessarily the population of potential suitable targets and that within large regions of Earth-crossing orbital space asteroids can be found that are both accessible and safe to manipulate from the standpoint of the Earth impact risk.

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Notes

  1. http://www.planetaryresources.com/ and http://deepspaceindustries.com/

  2. http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Preparing_for_the_Future/GSP/Study_Reports

  3. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/initiative

  4. Here used in the sense of the smallest Δv cost. Note however that small Δv cost is generally also indicative of long synodic periods with the Earth, and thus, for example, 2000 SG 344 is easily accessible within a very narrow range of Earth departure dates.

  5. http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/

  6. http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/groups.html

  7. http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/groups.html

  8. http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Preparing_for_the_Future/GSP/ 2012_01_ANNOUNCEMENT_OF_OPPORTUNITY_-_SYSNOVA_STUDY_DESCRIPTIONS

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Acknowledgments

The work reported was supported by the Marie Curie grant 330649 (AsteroidRetrieval). The author would also like to thank E.M. Alessi and four anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, insights and critiques on the manuscript.

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  1. Space Research Centre, Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, UK

    J. P. Sanchez

  2. Department of Applied Mathematics I, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    J. P. Sanchez

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Sanchez, J.P. Asteroid Target Selection and Orbital Manipulation Sensitivity for Deflection Demonstration Missions. J of Astronaut Sci 62, 125–147 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40295-015-0046-0

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