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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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309 records · Page 18

Overview of Mission Design for NASA Asteroid Redirect Robotic Mission Concept

Part of NASA's new asteroid initiative would be a robotic mission to capture a roughly four to ten meter asteroid and redirect its orbit to place it in translunar space. Once in a stable storage orbit at the Moon, astronauts would then visit the asteroid for science investigations, to test in space resource extraction, and to develop experience with human deep space missions. This paper discusses the mission design techniques that would enable the redirection of a 100-1000 metric ton asteroid into lunar orbit with a 40-50 kW Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) system.

Asteroid Redirect Robotic Vehicle (ARRV)↗

Dynamics of Asteroid 2006 RH120: Pre-Capture and Escape Phases

Asteroid 2006 RH120 was the first natural object captured by the Earth to be observed called a Minimoon. In this work, we show that the invariant manifolds of the orbits around the L1 and L2 Lagrange points play a significant role in the capture of the asteroid around Earth and its eventual escape from the Earth approximately 1 year later. This is similar to the Temporary Capture of comets around Jupiter. We determined that the asteroid was in a 27:29 mean motion resonance with the Earth and approached the Earth through the stable manifold of an L1 Northern Halo Orbit. After the Temporary Capture, the asteroid escaped the Earth through the unstable manifold of an L2 Southern Halo orbit and into a 21:20 resonant orbit with the Earth. The asteroid travelled through a series of resonant orbits before and after the capture. These resonant transitions are similar to the orbits of Galileo and Cassini during their touring phase, using resonant orbits to reduce mission ∆V requirements.

NEO↗

Managing Risk for the James Webb Space Telescope Deployment Mechanisms: Enabling First Light

The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is perhaps the most ambitious astronomy mission in NASA history and is the largest and most powerful space science telescope optimized for infrared detection. It is operating in an L2 Orbit about a million miles away from the earth. This will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope. It was so big that it had to fold origami – style to fit in the rocket and open in space.Webb’s 5-layer tennis court sized sunshield assembly(SSA) protects the telescope from the Sun’s thermal radiation enabling instruments to operate about 230degree C below 0. It relayed the first amazing picture of galaxies to the world on 12 July 2022. Webb’s unprecedented infrared sensitivity will peer back in time over 13.5 billion years to see the first galaxies born after the Big Bang.

JWST↗