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Low Cost/Low Energy NEO Mission?

September 19th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized

Thought experiment: Are their Near Earth Asteroids you can get to with what you can fit as a secondary payload in a PPOD?

6 comments

6 Comments so far

  1. Jonathan Goff October 21st, 2009 11:20 pm

    Michael,
    It would be challenging, but maybe not impossible. I was pretty surprised, but when I was running the numbers Monday night (don’t ask why), it turns out that most NEOs are actually as hard or harder to reach than lunar orbit. See the chart on: http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/~lance/delta_v/delta_v.rendezvous.html (and their reference which shows how the calculations were derived start on page 245 of this: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19780021064_1978021064.pdf)

    Anyhow, assuming you could get a secondary payload ride on a GTO flight, that takes off about 1500m/s of delta-V…but you still need to provide at least another 3200m/s. That’s *very* sporty for a PPOD. Basically unless you’re using solar/thermal or solar/ion propulsion you’re talking about a big rocket stage with a wee bitty payload. And quite frankly building a high delta-V rocket stage in under 6kg is daunting! That’s over 50% more delta-V than Xoie.

    NEOs are better for round-trip delta-V than the Moon or Mars, but they’re nowhere near as easy as I had been misled to believe previously.

    ~Jon

  2. Mike Lorrey December 8th, 2009 9:31 am

    I’d go with a solar sail system and work a minimum dV trajectory to reach L2 in a highly eccentric orbit. Slip through L2 to translate to L4 or L5, and from there on to your NEO asteroid. Note that normal dV calculations come out higher than the real minimums that are possible by using the lagrange points, but these sort of trips take a godawful long time.

  3. Ms. Pretty Blogger December 25th, 2009 5:24 am

    quite scary but i want it to be great

  4. R2K January 16th, 2010 10:49 am

    How much time do you have? You could try to sail it, maybe take a dip towards the sun and Venus for fun.

    The real question is, once you get there, how do you land?

  5. NStrange February 21st, 2010 9:25 pm

    I’ve seen studies where they put a small spacecraft with Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) on an ESPA ring and they can get it to many NEOs and even Mars.

  6. Mike Lorrey March 15th, 2010 7:18 pm

    How hard would it be to make a microchip sized version of VASIMR?

    The cube BETTER have borg cube labels stuck to its sides…

    Ok, take three cubes in a PPOD, one cube is fuel, one is the electric propulsion and solar power, and the third cube is the instruments and brains. You should be able to deploy 120 cm2 of solar cells for say, 10 watts. Use it to charge a supercapacitor that would burst power the nano-VASIMR during perigee, you should be able to make an eccentric enough orbit over time that at some point L1 will capture it at apogee. From there you can go wherever pretty easily.

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