Published February 25, 2016
| Submitted
Conference Paper
Open
Trajectories to Nab a NEA (Near-Earth Asteroid)
Abstract
In 2010 and 2011 NASA and KISS sponsored studies to investigate the feasibility of identifying, capturing, and returning an entire (albeit small) NEA to the vicinity of Earth, and concluded that a 40-kW solar electric propulsion system launched on an Atlas 551 provided sufficient propulsion to control an asteroid's trajectory. Once secured by the spacecraft, a NEA with a naturally close encounter with Earth is nudged over a few years to target a lunar gravity assist, capturing the object into Earth orbit. With further use of solar perturbations, up to 3,600,000 kg of NEA could be placed in high-lunar orbit.
Additional Information
The research described in this paper was sponsored by the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) and was carried out in part at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The authors are grateful to John Brophy, Lou Friedman, and Fred Culick for leading the Asteroid Retrieval Feasibility Study and to Dan Mazanek for his contributions to the mission design effort. We also thank Laura Burke for her design of the transfer trajectory to high lunar orbit.Attached Files
Submitted - GetaNEA_2-4-13.pdf
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GetaNEA_2-4-13.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 64697
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20160223-161720457
- Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS)
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- Created
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2016-02-25Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2019-10-03Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Keck Institute for Space Studies