Speaker
Description
The discovery of a new Near-Earth Object (NEO) with a significant probability of impacting the Earth will inevitably lead to threat mitigation strategies. Three key questions for threat mitigation are: (i) what is the probability that the object impacts the Earth?; (ii) Is the object large enough to threaten loss of life or property?; and (iii) what are the key characteristics of the object required to plan a mitigation strategy and mission? Rapidly addressing these three questions maximizes the time available on the ground to mitigate the threat of an impact.
The authors participated in a workshop in October 2022 at the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) titled “Enabling Fast Response Missions to NEOs, ISOs, and LPCs” to identify promising mission concepts and technologies that would enable rapid response approaches to potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs). Concepts investigated included pre-designed systems ready to be implemented, pre-manufactured systems ready to be launched, and systems launched to various staging orbits ready to be tasked to reconnoiter a recently discovered object. Advantages and disadvantages of each concept were explored in detail in the published study.
The workshop study concluded that there are significant opportunities for partnerships between governments, traditional aerospace companies, and emerging aerospace entities. Emerging small spacecraft capabilities offer the potential to reduce cost and schedule significantly, but at the cost of lower payload mass and higher risk. Furthermore, while there are many concepts for rapid response, there is no consensus approach to assessing proposed concepts. Rapid response concepts must be capable of successfully encountering future identified potential PHAs and returning key orbital properties (to determine impact probability and location) and physical properties (to inform mitigation techniques). Additionally, implementable concepts also need to be demonstrably viable by fitting within programmatic constraints including but not limited to the cost, schedule, launch capabilities.
In this paper we describe the conclusions of the KISS workshop in October 2022, identify key technology gaps to enable the reconnaissance of PHAs, and propose an approach to assess the merit and feasibility of mission concepts for PHA reconnaissance. We also provide recommendations for future study of programmatic and technical requirements and constraints that may facilitate future, implementable mission concept development for rapid response reconnaissance. Finally, we discuss how the development of this capability has feed-forward opportunities to explore long-period comets or interstellar objects, which have similar rapid-response requirements as PHAs.
Acknowledgements: We thank all the participants for their time, enthusiasm, and contributions to the workshop and the final report. We acknowledge critical support from the W. M. Keck Institute for Space Studies, and JPL/Caltech, under contract with NASA (80NM0018D0004). Finally, we thank Michele Judd, Janet Seid, and the KISS staff for their enthusiasm, dedication, and skill in planning and convening this workshop. D.Z.S. is supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award AST-2303553. This research award is partially funded by a generous gift of Charles Simonyi to the NSF Division of Astronomical Sciences. The award is made in recognition of significant contributions to Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time.