CONCEPTUAL DESIGN FOR DEFLECTING POTENTIALLY HAZARDOUS ASTEROID BY SPACE DUSTER

The Deflecting Asteroid by Dusting (DAD) mission addresses the challenges of deflecting a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) that has a large probability of impacting Earth. It is an innovative and mass-minimalist approach to exploit PHAs by using the dusting deflection method. This conceptual design is developed based on an asteroid space duster, which is a space miner that is equipped with dust mining equipment, path-finding systems, and robotic capabilities, that converts available materials into mining prospects. It also stores energy to power the space miner and produces thrust to deflect the asteroid. The primary goals of DAD are to use the dust-to-thrust dusting technique on a PHA and to characterize and measure the deflection caused by the dusting. The 99942 Apophis is used as the reference asteroid in the dust-to-thrust study to test the feasibility of using the approach for deflecting PHAs. There are currently no methods that continuously use the dust-to-thrust approach from an asteroid mining perspective in comparison to the existing deflecting asteroid concepts. This unsolved problem is the focus of the DAD-related study.