Speaker
Description
Keywords: Rapid Response, Reconnaissance Spacecraft, Mitigation Spacecraft, Short-Warning Time
The Planetary Defense Community has worked tirelessly over the last 30 years to detect and catalog potential asteroid and comet impact threats to the Earth. Great progress has been made in our knowledge of the compositions and orbits of the millions of asteroids and comets in the solar system. Because of this effort, we should have many years, perhaps even decades, of warning prior to a major impact threat.
Unfortunately, it is still possible that comets or smaller, darker asteroids, approaching from the direction of the Sun or from the outer solar system, could pose a threat with much shorter warning time. It is imperative that we prepare now to respond to such threats as rapidly as possible. Typical timelines for the design, construction, test, and launch of research spacecraft are on the order of four years or more once the team has Authorization to Proceed (AtP). AtP often follows several years or even decades of preliminary design work and scientific justification leading up to initial mission proposal and Phase A design studies. For maximum probability of mission success, established procedures for design, build, test, and launch of Planetary Defense missions should be followed whenever possible. We suggest it is possible to cut at least three years from our response time following AtP while maintaining high reliability for both reconnaissance and mitigation spacecraft.
We propose building and warehousing a pair of flexible reconnaissance spacecraft and a pair of flexible mitigation spacecraft. (Redundancy is important to mitigate potential launch failures.) If a threat arises, either set of spacecraft could be rapidly launched after readiness testing, transport to launch site, and integration onto an available launch vehicle. The individual spacecraft would be the result of meticulous design, careful construction, and thorough testing both before storage and prior to launch. Defense of our planet would not be a last-minute panicked response to an imminent impactor, but a carefully considered, planned series of missions to characterize the threat and, if necessary, mitigate potential disaster with readily available resources.
In this paper, we describe our proposed program for providing stored rapid response Planetary Defense spacecraft. The production of replacement spacecraft would be a continuous process where, after 10 – 15 years in storage, the stored spacecraft would be replaced with more modern versions (at affordable cost, in consequence of judiciously re-using design elements). The previously stored spacecraft would be released to the scientific community for a new mission proposed through an open AO (Announcement of Opportunity). This program would ensure that the world would always have a readily available and reasonably up to date set of reconnaissance and mitigation spacecraft to respond to any potential Earth impact threat. It would also provide a steady supply of spacecraft for gathering competitively proposed scientific data at a regular cadence. The very large population of asteroids ensures that many interesting and worthwhile destinations will always be available for the spacecraft, and many in situ measurements of asteroids is essential for improving both our Planetary Defense capabilities and scientific understanding.