Speaker
Description
To raise awareness of the potential threat that Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) might pose to life on Earth, the 2025 Planetary Defense Conference proposes a hypothetical asteroid impact scenario with the discovery of the “2024 PDC25” asteroid. To address this exercise, this work investigates different mission scenarios to conduct a spacecraft toward the asteroid and simulate an impact. Different launch dates are selected to investigate the optimal transfer, in terms of the increment of velocity (delta-V) requirements to complete the transfer, and to analyze how efficient earlier impacts might be in the deviation of the asteroid away from the Earth by the propagation of the ephemerids following the impact. To analyze and optimize the transfer, i.e. minimize the delta-V, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is utilized considering a bi-impulsive maneuver between the Earth and 2024 PDC25 and the solution of Lambert’s Problem as the fitness function. Furthermore, different departures from the Earth-Moon system are considered. As time is of the essence, given the unknown nature of the asteroid, a direct departure in a hyperbolic trajectory is taken as a reference against a mission that utilizes a lunar gravity assist to provoke the departure of the spacecraft of the system, both with a single chemical impulse. Thus, the total cost of the mission, in terms of delta-V, is comprehended as the increment of velocity to leave the system plus the ones for the interplanetary transfer until the impact. It’s important to highlight that although the lunar gravity assist adds time to the duration of the mission, it reduces the costs of the mission, once a smaller delta-V is required to send a spacecraft to the Moon, where it accelerates to the outside of the system. In addition, this extra time required to perform the lunar gravity assist is considered in the analysis, as the effects of an earlier deviation are taken into account.