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The study demonstrates that in an emergency situation, with only a very short warning time, the launch of a fast asteroid kinetic deflection mission is feasible (targeting launch-readiness in six months!), given that certain identified pre-requisites have been prepared well in advance. The capabilities and requirements of 'hijacking' and modifying a commercial spacecraft platform in order to perform asteroid kinetic deflection in the shortest possible time were consequently assessed.

ESA’s Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) is both a Technology Mission of Opportunity, and a mission to greatly improve our understanding of asteroid physical properties and their response to a hypervelocity impact event on their surface. The AIM mission is combined with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). Both missions complement one another in a joint asteroid impact test and observation campaign called Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA). The Thermal InfraRed Imager (TIRI) is Thermal IR imager of the AIM mission.

The MASCOT (Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout) lander onboard JAXA's Hayabusa 2 sample return mission to C-type Near Earth asteroid Ryugu is a lightweight (~ 10 kg) and compact (0.3 x 0.3 x 0.2 m3 ) landing platform with the capability to carry various in-situ experiments with a total mass of up to ~3 kg. Thus a system to payload mass ratio of 7:3 can be achieved.

The Light Touch2 concept proposes the use of laser ablation to change the orbital velocity of a 4m, 130 ton, asteroid by 1m/s in less than 3 years A laser beam is used to sublimate part of the asteroid material and generate a low and continuous thrust. This study demonstrates how to implement this concept on a medium class interplanetary spacecraft, here called AdAM (Asteroid Ablation Mission).
Methodology