Petit, Mathieu (Politecnico di Milano), Colombo, Camilla (Politecnico di Milano)

Optimal Deflection of Resonant Near-Earth Ob-Jects Using the B-Plane

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "Debris and asteroids" (FrM12), Friday, April 5, 2019, 09:00−09:30, BL281.1

5th CEAS Conference on Guidance, Navigation and Control, April 3-5, 2019, Milano, Italy

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on April 26, 2024

Abstract

A very large number of asteroids populates our Solar System; some of these are classified as Near Earth Objects (NEO), celestial bodies whose orbit lies close to or even intersects our planet’s, a few of which are believed to pose a poten-tial threat for Earth. Their hazardous nature has caught the eye of both the public and the scientific community and the concern has grown over the past decades, fol-lowed by a multitude of studies on the different aspects that characterise this prob-lem. The most common solution that has been proposed in order to face a potential impact situation is the deflection of incoming asteroids in such a way that their en-counter with the Earth is avoided or modified to an extent that it does not pose a threat through a kinetic impactor. The present article will expand on previous works in this sector, with the aim of defining an optimal orbit deviation strategy with the objective of not only avoiding the incumbent close-encounter, but to also reduce the risk of a future return of the NEO to the Earth. To this purpose, the effect of the deflection will be studied by means of the b-plane, a very convenient reference frame used to characterise an encounter between two celestial bodies, to determine a deflection strategy that will avoid the conditions corresponding to a resonant re-turn of the asteroid to the Earth. The results presented in this work feature an ana-lytical correlation between the deflection action and the resulting displacement along the axes of the b-plane and the description of optimal deflection techniques based on the aforementioned formulas. Finally, a numerical implementation of the deflection strategy demonstrates its effectiveness when applied to a test scenario.