Experimental analysis of laser ablated plumes for asteroid deflection and exploitation

Gibbings, Alison; Vasile, Massimiliano; Watson, Ian; Hopkins, James F.; Burns, D.

doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2012.07.008

Cited by 33 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…With reference to Figure 1, one can assume that, in general, a layer of asteroid material will undergo a transition from solid to liquid to vapour, when illuminated by the laser. This is consistent with the surface temperature registered during laboratory experiments by Gibbings et al (2013) and the triple point temperature of the materials most commonly found on S-type asteroids. In each phase, the temperature distribution and evolution will be dictated by the heat equation:…”

Section: Vaporization Of An S-type Asteroidsupporting

confidence: 77%

Theoretical peak performance and optical constraints for the deflection of an S-type asteroid with a continuous wave laser

Thiry

Vasile

2017

Advances in Space Research

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This paper presents a theoretical model to evaluate the thrust generated by a continuous wave (CW) laser, operating at moderate intensity(<100GW/m 2 ), ablating an S-type asteroid made of Forsterite. The key metric to assess the performance of the laser system is the thrust coupling coefficient which is given by the ratio between thrust and associated optical power. Three different models are developed in the paper: a one dimensional steady state model, a full 3D steady state model and a one dimensional model accounting for transient effects resulting from the tumbling motion of the asteroid. The results obtained with these models are used to derive key requirements and constraints on the laser system that allow approaching the ideal performance in a realistic case.

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Section: Vaporization Of An S-type Asteroidsupporting

confidence: 77%

Theoretical peak performance and optical constraints for the deflection of an S-type asteroid with a continuous wave laser

Thiry

Vasile

2017

Advances in Space Research

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“…From experimental investigations, we found that this contamination model predicts correctly the contamination level with a sticking coefficient x s of 0.5 [10]. Over the course of the deflection action, a contamination layer will grow on the solar arrays with the degradation factor decreasing slowly from an initial value of 1.…”

Section: Contaminationmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…(37) with sample points taken in the Halton low-discrepancy sequence [17]. Figures 9,10,11,and 12 show the expectations for different The cases with defocus reduce the maximum deflection by about 3 Earth radii. We see that the fixed deflection case presents more samples with higher deflection levels.…”

Section: Uncertainty Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimal control of a space-borne laser system for a 100 m asteroid deflection under uncertainties

Vetrisano

Cano

Thiry

et al. 2016

2016 IEEE Aerospace Conference

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Abstract-The paper demonstrates the technical feasibility to deflect a 100 m diameter asteroid using a moderate size spacecraft carrying a 1-20 kW solar-powered class laser. To this purpose, a recent model of the laser ablation mechanism based on the characteristics of both the laser systems and the asteroid has been used to calculate the exerted thrust in terms of direction and magnitude. This paper shows a preliminary deflection uncertainty analysis for two different control logic and assuming different laser mechanism capabilities. In particular, an optimal thrust control direction and fixed laser pointing strategies were considered with two laser optics settings: the first maintaining the focus length fixed and the second able to exactly focus on the surface. Preliminary results show that in general the fixed laser pointing strategy at low power is less able to impart high deflection. Nonetheless, when the power increases, the optimal thrust method produces undesired torques, which reduces the laser momentum coupling as side effects. However, the overall efficiency is higher in the optimal thrust case. Since the collision risk between an impacting asteroid and the Earth depends on the probability distribution of the input uncertainty parameters, it is necessary to study how the overall deflection will be affected. Both aleatory and epistemic uncertainties are taken into account to evaluate the probability of success of the proposed deflection methods.

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“…Many significant questions such as the solar system origin can be answered by exploring the asteroids. And at the same time, the potential risk that the asteroids impact Earth can be avoided by the asteroid exploration [1].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Asteroids Exploration Trajectory Optimal Design with Differential Evolution Based on Mixed Coding

Wang

Song

Dai

et al. 2015

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

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With the development of space technology, asteroid exploration will become a hotspot in the deep space exploration field. Space flight trajectory has the following requirements: needing a long time, having many engineering constraints, having a large number of targets, and having a series of feasible solutions. So how to find the global optimum flight program is the core issue of the deep space exploration trajectory design. This paper proposes a novel method to design the optimal trajectory by differential evolution (DE) algorithm for asteroid exploration based on mixed coding. In our method, the celestial sequence and the time sequence are coded together into the chromosomes of DE and optimized them simultaneously. The chromosomes are designed to include four parts: the celestial sequence, the exploration type, the time sequence, and the return time. The algorithm can make full use of the characteristics of the high efficiency and global optimization ability of differential evolution and can also avoid the problem of high complexity of the branch-and-bound algorithm and the problem of nonglobal optimal solution of the greedy algorithm. The algorithm is adopted to solve the Fourth Contest of National Space Orbit Design in China, and the result shows that both the computational efficiency and the performance of the algorithm are superior.

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Experimental analysis of laser ablated plumes for asteroid deflection and exploitation

Cited by 33 publications

References 23 publications

Theoretical peak performance and optical constraints for the deflection of an S-type asteroid with a continuous wave laser

Theoretical peak performance and optical constraints for the deflection of an S-type asteroid with a continuous wave laser

Optimal control of a space-borne laser system for a 100 m asteroid deflection under uncertainties

Asteroids Exploration Trajectory Optimal Design with Differential Evolution Based on Mixed Coding

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