Prospecting is a necessary pre-requisite of future asteroid mining ventures.It is generally assumed that inspection for the purpose of identifying the asteroid composition can be effectively accomplished from a distan...Prospecting is a necessary pre-requisite of future asteroid mining ventures.It is generally assumed that inspection for the purpose of identifying the asteroid composition can be effectively accomplished from a distance through remote sensing.To be carried out in a timely and economically viable way,prospecting is best performed by devising trajectories such that a single spacecraft manages to fly by as many asteroid as possible,yet seeking to minimize a cost function that we assume to be coincident with propellant consumption.In this paper,we present a method to identify trajectory sequences to multiple asteroids.We restrict our analysis to Near-Earth Asteroids(NEAs),i.e.„those with perihelion at less than 1.3 AU from the Sun,focusing on Apollo class NEAs only.The volume of space where encounter seeking takes place is a torus-shaped 3-D region in the proximity of the ecliptic.Under the assumption of using impulsive maneuvers to connect ballistic coast arcs,we show that a deterministic building blocks approach is successful in finding a significant number of multi-flyby mission profiles with the desired characteristics.Using this scheme,it is possible to envisage realistic asteroid prospecting missions using a single launch to deploy a number of small spacecraft,with tens—or possibly hundreds—of asteroids visited in a few years.展开更多
文摘Prospecting is a necessary pre-requisite of future asteroid mining ventures.It is generally assumed that inspection for the purpose of identifying the asteroid composition can be effectively accomplished from a distance through remote sensing.To be carried out in a timely and economically viable way,prospecting is best performed by devising trajectories such that a single spacecraft manages to fly by as many asteroid as possible,yet seeking to minimize a cost function that we assume to be coincident with propellant consumption.In this paper,we present a method to identify trajectory sequences to multiple asteroids.We restrict our analysis to Near-Earth Asteroids(NEAs),i.e.„those with perihelion at less than 1.3 AU from the Sun,focusing on Apollo class NEAs only.The volume of space where encounter seeking takes place is a torus-shaped 3-D region in the proximity of the ecliptic.Under the assumption of using impulsive maneuvers to connect ballistic coast arcs,we show that a deterministic building blocks approach is successful in finding a significant number of multi-flyby mission profiles with the desired characteristics.Using this scheme,it is possible to envisage realistic asteroid prospecting missions using a single launch to deploy a number of small spacecraft,with tens—or possibly hundreds—of asteroids visited in a few years.
