THE "TUOR" TEAM AND THE "ASTEROID HUNTING"

THE CHILEAN SPACE APPS CHALLENGE

Our Challenge

Develop a mission concept to explore Apophis (or any other significant asteroid) to better predict its orbital dynamics and to instrument the object with a radio transponder prior to the 2029 close approach. 

Team "Tuor": Carlos Aguilera, Rodolfo Novakovic, Erik Vallejos, Anton Rabanus, David Rabanus

IDEAS, DETAILS

•Tagging and tracking of only one asteroid (this challenge) does not make sense when there are >100.000 unknown objects in the asteroid belt that potentially can pose a risk to life on earth and require to be tracked.

•For a better orbit prediction it is required to know the forces that act on an asteroid.

•To calculate these forces, position and velocity vector of each of the objects need to be obtained

•Learning from the concept of WISE (NASA mission from 2010/2011, and continuing the observations).

•Lagrange-2 orbit at Mars: Half way to the Main Asteroid Belt (4x more signal!)

•CubeSat (Ardusat!) platform, 3U form factor

•Hitching a ride to Mars (~150kg ballast load)

•Swarm (“enjambre”) de >4 replicas

•Miniaturized ion thrusters for propulsion from Mars to L2@Mars, and attitude control

•Power from solar panels

•Telemetry/downlink via amplified CubeSat system

•Rotation-cone-scanning thermal IR telescope

•3x cell-phone CCD as star trackers

•Linux on-board processing of images (“stacking”) and data reduction

•200mm space-foldable telescope

•11 and 19 arcsec resolution

•2x Peltier-cooled microbolometer arrays

•10µm and 18µm color channels: main emission wavelength of asteroids

INTERPLANETARY MISSION DESCRIPTION RESULTS

•Download through amateur deep space network

•Post-processing at earth-bound facilities:

oChecking of data quality

oIncentive optical follow-up observations (validation)

oIngest orbital parameters of found asteroids into JPL database

oCalculate proximity values to Earth orbit

•Visualization via web-based access to database

SYNERGIES WITH OTHER SPACE APPS CHALLENGE

•Database for NEO (Near Earth Objects):

#NEOdatabase

•CubeSats for Asteroid Exploration:

#cubesats

•Ardusat:

#ardusat

•Hitch a ride to Mars:

#ridetomars

•Why We Explore:

#whyweexplore