Quantifying hazards: asteroid disruption in lunar distant retrograde orbits
Javier Roa, Casey J. Handmer
(Submitted on 14 May 2015)
The Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) proposes to retrieve a near-Earth asteroid and position it in a lunar distant retrograde orbit (DRO) for later study, crewed exploration, and ultimately resource exploitation. During the Caltech Space Challenge, a recent workshop to design a crewed mission to a captured asteroid in a DRO, it became apparent that the asteroid’s low escape velocity (<1 cm s−1) would permit the escape of asteroid particles during any meaningful interaction with astronauts or robotic probes. This Note finds that up to 5% of escaped asteroid fragments will cross Earth-geosynchronous orbits and estimates the risk to satellites from particle escapes or complete disruption of a loosely bound rubble pile.
Comments:9 pages, 3 figures
Subjects:Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Space Physics (physics.space-ph)
Cite as:arXiv:1505.03800 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1505.03800v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Javier Roa
[v1] Thu, 14 May 2015 17:11:58 GMT (3076kb,D)
