Optimal impact strategies for asteroid deflection

TL;DR

This paper develops analytical formulas and optimization methods to identify the best impact strategies for asteroid deflection, demonstrating that small spacecraft can achieve significant deviations.

Contribution

It introduces a new analytical approach for optimal impact direction and launch timing in asteroid deflection strategies.

Findings

Proximal motion formulas accurately predict asteroid deviation.

Optimal impact directions vary with asteroid and timing.

Small spacecraft can induce significant asteroid deviations.

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of optimal impact strategies to deflect potentially dangerous asteroids. To compute the increase in the minimum orbit intersection distance of the asteroid due to an impact with a spacecraft, simple analytical formulas are derived from proximal motion equations. The proposed analytical formulation allows for an analysis of the optimal direction of the deviating impulse transferred to the asteroid. This ideal optimal direction cannot be achieved for every asteroid at any time; therefore, an analysis of the optimal launch opportunities for deviating a number of selected asteroids was performed through the use of a global optimization procedure. The results in this paper demonstrate that the proximal motion formulation has very good accuracy in predicting the actual deviation and can be used with any deviation method because it has general validity. Furthermore, the characterization of optimal launch opportunities shows that a significant deviation can be obtained even with a small spacecraft.