The Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission is a joint cooperation between European and US space agencies that consists of two separate and independent spacecraft that will be launched to a binary asteroid system, the near-Earth asteroid Didymos, to test the kinetic impactor technique to deflect an asteroid. The European Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) is set to rendezvous with the asteroid system to fully characterise the smaller of the two binary components a few months prior to the impact by the US Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft. AIM is a unique mission as it will be the first time that a spacecraft will investigate the surface, subsurface, and internal properties of a small binary near-Earth asteroid. In addition it will perform various important technology demonstrations that can serve other space missions.The knowledge obtained by this mission will have great implications for our understanding of the history of the Solar System. Having direct information on the surface and internal properties of small asteroids will allow us to understand how the vaious processes they undergo work and transform these small bodies as well as, for this particular case, how a binary system forms. Making these measurements from up close and comparing them with ground-based data from telescopes will also allow us to calibrate remote observations and improve our data interpretation of other systems. With DART, thanks to the characterization of the target by AIM, the mission will be the first fully documented impact experiment at asteroid scale, which will include the characterization of the target's properties and the outcome of the impact. AIDA will thus offer a great opportunity to test and refine our understanding and models at the actual scale of an asteroid, and to check whether the current extrapolations of material strength from laboratory-scale targets to the scale of AIDA's target are valid. Moreover, it will offer a first check of the validity of the kinetic impactor concept to deflect a small body and lead to improved efficiency for future kinetic impactor designs. This paper focuses on the science return of AIM, the current knowledge of its target from ground-based observations, and the instrumentation planned to get the necessary data.

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The general three‐dimensional periodic orbits around asteroids were investigated to study orbital behaviours in the vicinity of irregular gravitational bodies. The orbital patterns around periodic orbits were determined through decomposition into corresponding local manifolds. In this paper, a topological classification of periodic orbits is presented to discriminate the stability and dynamical behaviours of neighbours. A hierarchical grid searching method was developed for systematically searching three‐dimensional periodic orbits around irregular bodies. The method was used to generate 29 basic families around the asteroid 216 Kleopatra as an example. By calculating the characteristic multipliers of periodic orbits, numerical evidence was generated to describe the denseness of periodic orbits around asteroids and to demonstrate the remarkable asymmetry among these orbits. The dependence of the topology of the periodic orbits on the Jacobi integral was examined, revealing the evolutionary features of the stability and orbital patterns nearby. The results can be used to assess the environment around 216 Kleopatra, and this method can be useful in the studies of other asteroids.

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Abstract. This paper studies the distribution of characteristic multipliers, the structure of submanifolds, the phase diagram, bifurcations and chaotic motions in the potential field of rotating highly irregular-shaped celestial bodies (hereafter called irregular bodies). The topological structure of the submanifolds for the orbits in the potential field of an irregular body is shown to be classified into 34 different cases, including 6 ordinary cases, 3 collisional cases, 3 degenerate real saddle cases, 7 periodic cases, 7 period-doubling cases, 1 periodic and collisional case, 1 periodic and degenerate real saddle case, 1 period-doubling and collisional case, 1 period-doubling and degenerate real saddle case, and 4 periodic and period-doubling cases. The different distribution of the characteristic multipliers has been shown to fix the structure of the submanifolds, the type of orbits, the dynamical behaviour and the phase diagram of the motion. Classifications and properties for each case are presented. Moreover, tangent bifurcations, period-doubling bifurcations, Neimark-Sacker bifurcations and the real saddle bifurcations of periodic orbits in the potential field of an irregular body are discovered. Submanifolds appear to be Mobius strips and Klein bottles when the period-doubling bifurcation occurs.2

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