Asteroid Return Mission Feasibility Study

Abstract

This paper describes an investigation into the technological feasibility of finding, characterizing, robotically capturing, and returning an entire Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) to the International Space Station (ISS) for scientific investigation, evaluation of its resource potential, determination of its internal structure and other aspects important for planetary defense activities, and to serve as a testbed for human operations in the vicinity of an asteroid. Reasonable projections suggest that several dozen candidates NEAs in the size range of interest (~2-m diameter) will be known before the end of the decade from which a suitable target could be selected. The conceptual mission objective is to return a ~10,000-kg asteroid to the ISS in a total flight time of approximately 5 years using a single Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle. Preliminary calculations indicate that this could be accomplished using a solar electric propulsion (SEP) system with high-power Hall thrusters and a maximum power into the propulsion system of approximately 40 kW. The SEP system would be used to provide all of the post-launch ∆V. The asteroid would have an unrestricted Earth return Planetary Protection categorization, and would be curated at the ISS where numerous scientific and resource utilization experiments would be conducted. Asteroid material brought to the ground would be curated at the NASA Johnson Space Center. This preliminary study identified several areas where additional work is required, but no show stoppers were identified for the approach that would return an entire 10,000-kg asteroid to the ISS in a mission that could be launched by the end of this decade.

Combined low-thrust propulsion and invariant manifold trajectories to capture NEOs in the Sun–Earth circular restricted three-body problem

“…The value RM-1 is obtained assuming the spacecraft introduced in the Keck study (Brophy et al 2011) (5500 kg dry mass and 8100 kg propellant mass at the NEO encounter), while the value RM-2 is computed considering a NASA Cassinilike spacecraft (2442 kg dry mass and 3132 kg propellant mass). 4 Comparing the maximum value of retrievable mass of the optimized solutions (columns labeled RM-1 and RM-2 in Table 5) with the estimated value of mass for each of the twelve EROs (column labeled mass in Table 1), it is clear that asteroids A# 7, A# 9 and A# 11 can not be captured, as the maximum retrievable mass value (corresponding to column labeled RM-2 in Table 5) is lower than the lowest estimated mass value of the candidate asteroids.…”

“…Merging together the advances in both asteroid deflection technologies and dynamical system theory, which allow new and cheaper means of space transportation, new mission concepts, such as low energy asteroid retrieval missions (Brophy et al 2011), arise. Moreover, with the incorporation of low-thrust propulsion into the invariant manifolds technique, the aim of this work is to design asteroid capture trajectories with a further reduction of propellant mass with respect to chemical propulsion strategies (Sánchez et al 2012a;García-Yárnoz et al 2013).…”

Asteroid capture using lunar flyby

“…space program and gains attention again as the technology makes it possible to capture an asteroid artificially. To test the validity of this assertion, NASA sponsored a study in 2010 to investigate the feasibility of capturing a small near-Earth asteroid (NEA) to the International Space Station (ISS) by 2025 (Brophy et al, 2011). On June 19, 2014, NASA reported that asteroid 2011 MD was a prime candidate for capture by the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), perhaps in the early 2020s (Borenstein, 2014).…”

Attitude Control and Stabilization of Spacecraft with a Captured Asteroid

“…Feasibility studies for the ARM mission have identified the challenges and enabling technologies for this mission. 5,6,7 According to these studies, the most desirable asteroids are the carbonaceous C-type asteroids because samples from these asteroids can return to Earth without any restriction. 6 The densities of asteroids can range from 1 g cm…”

“…5,6,7 The objective of the first ARM mission concept is to capture a NEO asteroid in deep space and transport the captured asteroid back to the Earth-Moon system. The conceptual ARM spacecraft design shown in Fig.…”