9th IAA PLANETARY DEFENSE CONFERENCE 2025

The Space Mission Planning Advisory Group (SMPAG) is one of the two UN-endorsed groups that deals with the asteroid impact threat. The other group is called International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN). SMPAG members are space-faring nations, and their task is to discuss how a space-based response to an asteroid impact threat could look like [1].
The critera for SMPAG to become active...

Please find the abstract in attachment.

The 2025 Planetary Defense Conference (PDC) hypothetical asteroid impact threat exercise is being conducted in coordination with the United Nations-endorsed Space Mission Planning Advisory Group (SMPAG), enabling an exercise of SMPAG’s process for producing technical recommendations for space mission options using inputs received from space agencies in participating nations. In this paper, we...

In planetary defense exercise scenarios, most discussions of rapid response reconnaissance missions focus on dedicated spacecraft. These are typically new spacecraft, designed and built specifically for the purpose of surveying a newly discovered asteroid that is potentially threatening Earth. A new reconnaissance spacecraft takes approximately three to five years to reach the launch pad, and...

The growing interest in addressing asteroid threat scenarios is justified by current estimates of the Potentially Hazardous Objects (PHOs) population and by recent impacts on Earth. Since 2015, exercises involving hypothetical hazardous asteroids have been proposed, with various solutions discussed during Planetary Defense Conferences (PDCs). This paper presents and analyses preliminary...

As part of the SMPAG exercise held this year, the ESA NEO Coordination Centre (NEOCC) contributed in assessing potential impact scenarios for the simulated asteroid 2024 PDC25. By using all the available data at epoch 1 publicly realized in July, we used our Aegis system (1) to compute the orbit and the impact probability (IP) of 2024 PDC25 for the next 100 years. We found an IP of 1.6% in...

In planetary defense scenarios, there is often a limited amount of information about the properties of the object during the early phases. Statistical inference methods which leverage prior knowledge about the population of Near Earth Asteroids have successfully been utilized in PDC and IAWN exercises to augment the available measurements about the specific hypothetical impactor. The physical...

Keywords: asteroid, impact risk, modeling uncertainty

Determining the potential damage and risk from an asteroid impact involves many sources of uncertainty. Limited observational data leads to uncertainties in the asteroid properties, orbital uncertainties affect the potential impact location, and the entry and damage models all have some inherent modeling uncertainty. When each of...

A hypothetical asteroid-impact scenario (http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/pdc25/) will be used as the basis for discussion and analyses during the PDC 2025 table-top exercise. The asteroid is “discovered” on June 5, 2024, and is classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid with a diameter initially estimated between 90-160 meters with a median size of 125 meters and a full-size range of 50-280...

Keywords: Asteroid Threat Exercise, Earth Impact Effects, Impact Monitoring
Abstract
If the mitigation efforts do not succeed to alter the trajectory of 2024 PDC25, the
asteroid will impact near Cape Town, South Africa, depositing 250 megatons of energy
and creating a crater of about 3 km in diameter. If this happens it would be of obvious
interest to observe this impact in as much detail...