This paper presents an analysis of optimal impact strategies to deflect potentially dangerous asteroids. In order to compute the increase in the minimum orbit intersection distance of the asteroid due to an impact with a spacecraft, simple analytical formulae are derived from proximal motion equations. The proposed analytical formulation allows for an analysis of the optimal direction of the de...

In order to obtain sufficiently accurate spherical harmonic model of asteroid’s gravity field during the design stage of asteroid exploration mission which we can benefit from to design the orbit trajectory or the landing trajectory, the author of this paper proposed a method to determine the spherical harmonic model of asteroid’s gravity field based on polyhedron model. Firstly, this method re...

The asteroid belt is found today in a dramatically different state than that immediately following its formation. It is estimated that it has been depleted in total mass by a factor of at least 1000 since its formation, and that the asteroids’ orbits evolved from having near-zero eccentricity and inclination to the complex distributions we find today. The asteroid belt also hosts a wide range o...

In this paper, we discuss the detection of systematic biases in star positions of the USNO A1.0, A2.0, and B1.0 catalogs, as deduced from the residuals of numbered asteroid observations. We present a technique for the removal of these biases, and validate this technique by illustrating the resulting improvements in numbered asteroid residuals, and by establishing that debiased orbits predict om...

This paper considers the coupled orbit and attitude dynamics of a dumbbell spacecraft around an asteroid. Geometric methods are used to derive the coupled equations of motion, defined on the configuration space of the special Euclidean group, and then a nonlinear controller is designed to enable trajectory tracking of desired landing trajectories. Rather than relying on sliding mode control or ...

In 2006, the 2 Global Trajectory Optimization Competition (GTOC2) posed a “Grand Asteroid Tour” trajectory optimization problem, where participants were required to find the best possible low-thrust trajectory that would rendezvous with one asteroid from each of four defined groups. As a first step, most teams employed some form of design space pruning, in order to reduce the overall number of ...

Asteroid 2867 Steins is one of two flyby targets of ESA’s International Rosetta Mission, launched in March, 2004. We obtained CCD observations of Steins on April 1416, 2004 at Table Mountain Observatory, California, in order to characterize the asteroid physically, information that is crucial for planning the Steins flyby. This study includes the first detailed analysis of the physical properti...

The asteroid (4) Vesta, parent body of the Howardite-Eucrite-Diogenite meteorites, is one of the first bodies that formed, mostly from volatile-depleted material, in the Solar System. The Dawn mission recently provided evidence that hydrated material was delivered to Vesta, possibly in a continuous way, over the last 4 Ga, while the study of the eucritic meteorites revealed a few samples that c...

We study spacecraft motion near a binary asteroid by means of theoretical and computational tools from geometric mechanics and dynamical systems. We model the system assuming that one of the asteroids is a rigid body (ellipsoid) and the other a sphere. In particular, we are interested in finding periodic and quasi-periodic orbits for the spacecraft near the asteroid pair that are suitable for o...

[1] NEAR Shoemaker images reveal widespread occurrence of tectonic landforms on asteroid 433 Eros. Hinks Dorsum is a ridge that extends for about 18 km around the asteroid and strongly resembles thrust fault structures on the terrestrial planets. Tectonic landforms can provide information on the mechanical properties of asteroids, a subject of much controversy. Modeling constrained by topograph...