The Femtospacecraft Asteroid Impact Mission (Faim): A Low Cost Mission to Monitor the Dart Impact on the Didymoon (original) (raw)
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The Asteroid Impact Mission is an ESA mission, part of a joint collaboration with NASA in the AIDA (Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment) mission. The primary goal of AIDA is to assess the feasibility of deflecting the heliocentric path of a Near Earth Asteroid binary system, by impacting on the surface of the smaller asteroid of the couple. To this purpose, AIDA includes a kinetic impactor, DART by NASA and an observer, AIM by ESA. The consolidated mission analysis of AIM spacecraft is presented with a breakdown into the main mission phases. AIM is planned to be launched in late 2020 and to arrive at Didymos system in middle 2022. Suitable transfer solutions and launch window are presented; the approaching strategy to rendezvous with the binary system is discussed and close proximity operations at the asteroid are finally described. The results and analyses presented in the paper are currently performed by OHB System AG, Politecnico di Milano and Spin.Works under the European Space Agency study for phase A/B1 design of the AIM spacecraft. The project is currently ongoing and the mission analysis will be further iterated and refined through the design phase.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART): Planetary Defense Investigations and Requirements
The Planetary Science Journal, 2021
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is a Planetary Defense mission, designed to demonstrate the kinetic impactor technique on (65803) Didymos I Dimorphos, the secondary of the (65803) Didymos system. DART has four level 1 requirements to meet in order to declare mission success: (1) impact Dimorphos between 2022 September 25 and October 2, (2) cause at least a 73 s change in its binary orbit period via the impact, (3) measure the change in binary period to an uncertainty of 7.3 s or less, and (4) measure the momentum transfer efficiency (β) of the impact and characterize the resulting effects of the impact. The data necessary to achieve these requirements will be obtained and analyzed by the DART Investigation Team. We discuss the rationales for the data to be gathered, the analyses to be undertaken, and how mission success will be achieved.
Momentum Transfer from the DART Mission Kinetic Impact on Asteroid Dimorphos
The NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission performed a kinetic impact on asteroid Dimorphos, the satellite of the binary asteroid (65803) Didymos, at 23:14 UTC on September 26, 2022 as a planetary defense test1. DART was the first hypervelocity impact experiment on an asteroid at size and velocity scales relevant to planetary defense, intended to validate kinetic impact as a means of asteroid deflection. Here we report the first determination of the momentum transferred to an asteroid by kinetic impact. Based on the change in the binary orbit period2, we find an instantaneous reduction in Dimorphos’s along-track orbital velocity component of 2.70 ± 0.10 mm s–1, indicating enhanced momentum transfer due to recoil from ejecta streams produced by the impact3,4. For a Dimorphos bulk density range of 1,500 to 3,300 kg m–3, we find that the expected value of the momentum enhancement factor, β, ranges between 2.2 and 4.9, depending on the mass of Dimorphos. If Dimorphos and D...
Successful kinetic impact into an asteroid for planetary defence
Nature
Although no known asteroid poses a threat to Earth for at least the next century, the catalogue of near-Earth asteroids is incomplete for objects whose impacts would produce regional devastation1,2. Several approaches have been proposed to potentially prevent an asteroid impact with Earth by deflecting or disrupting an asteroid1–3. A test of kinetic impact technology was identified as the highest-priority space mission related to asteroid mitigation1. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is a full-scale test of kinetic impact technology. The mission’s target asteroid was Dimorphos, the secondary member of the S-type binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos. This binary asteroid system was chosen to enable ground-based telescopes to quantify the asteroid deflection caused by the impact of the DART spacecraft4. Although past missions have utilized impactors to investigate the properties of small bodies5,6, those earlier missions were not intended to deflect their t...
To prevent from future Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHA), one of the most relevant techniques to be proved and tested is the deflection of the heliocentric path of the asteroid. Despite many theoretical studies on asteroid deflections are present in literature, this kind of solution has never been tested in a relevant environment before. ESA's Asteroid Impact Monitoring (AIM) mission is a joint mission with NASA's DART mission (AIM+DART=AIDA mission). AIDA represents the first space mission aimed to assessing the possibility of deflecting the heliocentric orbital path of an asteroid [1], [3]. The target of the study is the binary Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) (65803) Didymos, which will transit close to the Earth (less than 0.7 AU) in late 2022. Didymos is a binary asteroid system composed by a primary asteroid of 800 m diameter and a smaller asteroid of about 170 m diameter [2], [4], [5]. The goal of AIM mission is to characterize the binary couple before and after the orbital deflection of the asteroid system. The heliocentric deflection is obtained by means of a high velocity (about 6 km/s) kinetic impact, performed by DART spacecraft. The paper presents the preliminary study for the mission analysis of AIM spacecraft. The study covers all main phases of the mission, from the selection of the launch window and the design of the interplanetary transfer, to close proximity operations at the binary system. Innovative solutions are presented to lower Δv budget during close proximity operations, by exploiting the gravity of the smaller asteroid. The binary system is modeled as a Three-Body system, to better exploit its peculiar dynamic environment and better design the mission [6]. Even if the paper content focuses on the AIM mission scenario, the presented approach can be easily generalized to assess the feasibility and costs in terms of Δv budget and time constraints of a mission to a NEA.
ESA's Asteroid Impact Mission: Mission Analysis and Payload Operations state of the art
The Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) is an ESA mission whose goal is the exploration and study of binary asteroid 65803 Didymos. AIM is planned to be the first spacecraft to rendezvous with a binary asteroid: its mission objectives include the highly relevant scientific return of the exploration as well as innovative technological demonstrations. The paper presents some updates on the ongoing design of the mission. Each phase of the operative life of AIM spacecraft is detailed with information and results on the solutions adopted for Mission Analysis design and on the strategies to suitably operate payloads. The work presented in this paper has been performed by the authors under ESA contract within the phase A design of AIM mission.
The European Asteroid Impact Mission: Phase A Design And Mission Analysis
AIM is part of a joint collaboration with NASA in the AIDA (Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment) mission. The primary goal of AIDA is to assess the feasibility of deflecting the heliocentric path of a Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) binary system, by impacting on the surface of the smaller secondary asteroid of the couple. The work here presented is part of the phase A study, currently performed by OHB System AG, Politecnico di Milano and Spin.Works under the European Space Agency study for phase A/B1. The paper focuses on the mission analysis of AIM spacecraft during the main phases of the mission: interplanetary transfer, rendezvous with the asteroid and close proximity operations.