Citation
Bombardelli, Claudio and Urrutxua, Hodei and Gálvez, Andrés and Carnelli, Ian
(2012).
The SIROCO Asteroid Deflection Demonstrator.
In: "22nd AAS/AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting", 29/01/2012 - 02/02/2012, Charleston, South Carolina, USA. ISBN 978-0-87703-581-7. pp. 1883-1892.
Abstract
There is evidence of past Near-Earth-Objects (NEOs) impacts on Earth and several studies indicating that even relatively small objects are capable of causing
large local damage, either directly or in combination with other phenomena, e.g. tsunamis. This paper describes a space mission concept to demonstrate some of the
key technologies to rendezvous with an asteroid and accurately measure its trajectory during and after a deflection maneuver. The mission, called SIROCO, makes
use of the recently proposed ion beam shepherd (IBS) concept where a stream of accelerated plasma ions is directed against the surface of a small NEO resulting in
a net transmitted deflection force. We show that by carefully selecting the target NEO a measurable deflection can be obtained in a few weeks of continuous thrust
with a small spacecraft and state of the art electric propulsion hardware.