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NEO Background Asteroids and cometsNEOs introductionAre NEOs dangerous?Why space missions?ESA mission studies Deflection precursor Don Quijote conceptSANCHO studyNEOMAP NEOMAPNEOMAP final recommendationsNEOMAP reportOther ESA NEO activities Spaceguard Central NodeOther past studiesMultimedia Multimedia gallery
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Deflection precursor
Thanks to the quality of ESA studies, Europe has gained a very good understanding of the mission options for NEO risk assessment.
But, while obtaining information on a NEO (or even on a number of them) can improve our knowledge on that specific object (or on the NEO population), because of the wide variety of object types, it would not reduce or remove significant uncertainties on our ability to prevent a collision for a given impactor. In particular the ability to change the orbit of an object (deflection) has not yet been demonstrated, and a vital link in the chain from threat identification to threat mitigation is therefore missing.
The general public would like to know that this capability is available, or to know what needs to be done in order to attain this goal. Cost effective ways to carry out experiments to demonstrate these techniques while obtaining information on the physical properties of the body (and therefore being able to understand the results of the experiments) is thus an important objective.
Such a “NEO precursor mission” would prepare and pave the way to an effective “NEO deflection mission”, as opposed to rehearsing a pure fully-fledged deflection mission that would face large uncertainties, present high technology risks and costs.
The development of precursor experiments and missions would also provide an excellent opportunity for international cooperation, from which all partners would benefit in terms of mission return, technology development and public relations.
Last update: 30 March 2006 | |
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