Asteroid mining lies somewhere in our future. A new study says pairs of spacecraft working together would be the most effective.
doesn’t show the pitcher spacecraft’s initial journey from Earth to the target asteroid. Image Credit: Ionescu et al. 2022
Then the team examined two scenarios to compare single-spacecraft missions with two-spacecraft missions. Each scenario is considered in terms of Delta V. Delta V measures how much acceleration is required to move an object, in this case spacecraft and asteroids. Delta V is the heart of the issue, but so is the amount of mass returned.
This schematic from the paper shows the Delta Vs for a single-spacecraft and two-spacecraft capture of a single asteroid. There’s no Delta V advantage for the two-spacecraft method, but that method returns more mass. Image Credit: Ionescu et al. 2022 In this deeper analysis, the mission architectures remain the same. In the single-spacecraft model, the spacecraft travels to an asteroid, brings it to a heliocentric orbit, then travels to the next asteroid. In the two-spacecraft model, the pitcher moves from asteroid to asteroid while the catcher remains in an Earth heliocentric orbit. In their analysis, each mission visits the same asteroids in the same order, but in real mission planning, that may not be the case.
The team ran thousands of simulations. In their simulations, the semi-major axes of the asteroids play a key role. The team found that the further away the semi-major axis is from one astronomical unit , the lower the returned mass is. Of course, any real benefits will depend on individual missions and the orbits and masses of individual asteroids. “Thus, the two-spacecraft has the potential to deliver a higher mass within a lower amount of time, but it still remains dependent on the targeted asteroids and launch date, such that a case-by-case analysis is necessary,” they write.
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