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Students of the MSc course in Astronautics and Space Engineering 2006/07 at
Cranfeld University took the Precursor Rendezvous for Impact Mitigation of
Asteroids (PRIMA) mission as one of their group projects. This report summarises
their fndings. Asteroid impacts have shaped Earth's development in the past and
they will continue to do so in the future. Large asteroid impacts are acts of
nature beyond our ability to mitigate, but the much more frequent impacts with
continental rather than global scale can now be prevented in many cases.
Effective impact prevention depends on good knowledge of the asteroid threat:
the PRIMA mission's goal is to obtain enough information about an asteroid's
orbit and composition to enable impact prevention. This PRIMA study's objective
is a feasible mission design. The asteroid Apophis was chosen as the prime
target because it is representative of the most likely impact risk and it is
also the highest current asteroid threat to Earth. To develop the baseline
design the team initially identifed a range of mission concepts and then chose
the best of these using a trade-off based on the concepts' various attributes.
The next phase was to develop outline designs for each sub-system, focussing on
issues which could affect mission feasibility. The resulting baseline design
consists of a 600 kg spacecraft with electric propulsion and a lander containing
a tracking beacon which is placed on Apophis. Asteroid composition is measured
by radar and seismometry. All results so far indicate that this concept is
feasible, although further work is required especially in the areas of low-
thrust trajectories for asteroid rendezvous, and technologies for the tracking
transponder, measuring asteroid composition, and attaching equipment to an
asteroid where gravity is weak and surface composition is uncertain. |
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