Planetary defense mission concepts for disrupting/pulverizing hazardous asteroids with short warning time

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of space mission concepts for disrupting or pulverizing hazardous asteroids, especially with warning time shorter than approximately 10 years. An innovative mission concept, referred to as a nuclear hypervelocity asteroid intercept vehicle (HAIV) system, employs both a kinetic-energy impactor and nuclear explosive devices. A new mission concept of exploiting a multiple kinetic-energy impactor vehicle (MKIV) system that doesn't employ nuclear explosives is proposed in this paper, especially for asteroids smaller than approximately 150 m in diameter. The multiple shock wave interaction effect on disrupting or pulverizing a small asteroid is discussed using hydrodynamic simulation results.A multi-target terminal guidance problem and a planetary defense mission design employing a heavy-lift launch vehicle are also briefly discussed in support of the new non-nuclear MKIV mission concept. The nuclear HAIV and non-nuclear MKIV systems complement to each other to effectively mitigate the various asteroid impact threats with short warning time.

Mars Powered Descent Phase Guidance Design Based on Fixed-Time Stabilization Technique

“…The simulation result shown in Fig. 10 confirms this conclusion that the system state s 1i can be within a boundary, which is ±23.8472 after 9.76 s. For a lander equipped with engine-limited thrusters, it is necessary to investigate how a guidance scheme performs with this limitation [23]. The proposed guidance is based on the fixed-time stabilization technique, which needs a large control input to guarantee the convergence speed when initial states are far away from the equilibrium point.…”

“…By substituting (23) into (22), the command acceleration explicitly appears in the equation of the second sliding surface as follows:…”

Hayabusa2 extended mission: New voyage to rendezvous with a small asteroid rotating with a short period

“…Growing efforts have proposed effective procedures for deflecting hazardous objects. Kinetic impactors and explosive processes have been one of common mitigation technologies considered in the communities (Leung et al, 2017;Wie et al, 2017), although the physical properties of target asteroids are key parameters of the deflection efficiency (Bruck Syal et al, 2016;Feldhacker et al, 2017). There have been proposed other deflection techniques using ablation (McMahon and Scheeres, 2017), mass ejection (Brack and McMahon, 2020), tethering (Venditti et al, 2020), and gravitational tractor (Lu and Love, 2005).…”

Conceptual Design for Deflecting a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid with a Space Duster

“…Although there are several identified strategies with a clear vision for removing a physical body from its original trajectory that have been introduced, such as the kinetic impactor of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test [1], pulverizing hazardous asteroids with a short warning time [2], multifunctional paintball cloud [3], H-reversal trajectory using solar sails [4], and interception missions with a solar sail spacecraft [5], none of the aforementioned strategies can provide accurate solutions from an asteroid mining perspective, although their methods for deflecting PHAs are unique because most of the solutions are from theoretical perspectives and obtaining a whole asteroid from space is impossible. Before it reaches the atmosphere of Earth, it has already disintegrated.…”