Citation

Massonnet D, Meyssignac B. Acta Astronaut. 2006; 59(1-5): 77-83.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2006, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.actaastro.2006.02.030

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The issue of protecting the Earth against an asteroid impact is very popular and many concepts have been proposed to fulfil this objective. In this paper, we develop the idea of capturing a small size asteroid from an orbit close to Earth's in terms of energy and placing it into a loose Earth-bound orbit in order to use it as a shield by engineering its collision with any incoming, threatening body prior to its impact with the Earth. The operations for turning the captured asteroid into an efficient shield appear to be quicker, easier, cheaper and safer than an mission aimed at landing on an incoming impact-bound asteroid either for altering its trajectory or attempting to destroy it. The aim is an asteroid typically 20-40 m in diameter, too small to cause damage on Earth if an improper management leads to its crash, but big enough to destroy and deviate any incoming body if a collision is engineered with it preferably at more than one million km from Earth. Such a collision could be implemented within a 8 month time frame. Such an asteroid would also be a source of material such as liquid oxygen for exploratory missions. We show that the production of this material is much more efficient from an asteroid's surface than from the Moon's. As the celestial surface most accessible from Earth, a captured asteroid is also easier to engineer. Several thousands of tons of oxygen might become available sitting on the outer rim of Earth's gravity field. We examine the advantages and drawbacks of this concept and we propose a stepped approach for making it a reality within a foreseeable future. Key factors are first the detection of a candidate, whose small size make it difficult to spot, among a population of asteroids easy to reach from the Earth. We have identified such a potential candidate in 2000SG344 and describe the parameters of its capture. The second key point is how to deviate the candidate into an loose Earth bound orbit. Our preferred concept is to deposit a small robotic instrument aimed at throwing up matter gathered on the surface of the body with typical velocities of tens of meters per second. The robot would require a year and a few hundreds of watts continuously to alter the velocity of the asteroid in such a way as to inject it through an Earth-Sun Lagrange point, and then to control a Lagrangian quasi-periodic orbit with a typical 6-month period. We conclude that such an enterprise is far from being unfeasible and that it can probably be conducted using today's systems and exploratory tools in a few years time frame.