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The European Space Agency have announced their commitment to investigating Near Earth Objects and techniques that could be used to prevent an impact. In ESA's view, these are activities that surpass national boundaries and which it considers to be a service to the international community. ESA's space research institute outside Rome in Italy, ESRIN, also hosts the Spaceguard Central Node. This private non-profit scientific organisation aims to support and coordinate NEO research throughout the world. In the UK the Spaceguard UK organisation is led by Major Jonathan Tate and played a central role in drawing the UK Governments attention to NEO Hazards. The UK Government's Task Force report recommended that the Government should encourage ESA to specifically examine aspects of the NEO hazard.
Now ESA has launched a new project to find the best ideas on how to protect the Earth from NEOs and in particular, to learn more about them. In June a panel of NEO experts met to select the best six proposals. Andres Galvez, one of ESA's representatives on the panel reports, "the six winning proposals were selected because the mission concepts would help to answer essential questions on the NEO threat such as: how many are there, what is their size and mass, are they compact bodies or loose rock aggregates?
The chosen projects are:
Don Quijote: This proposal is for a spacecraft 'named Hidalgo' to hit a target asteroid at high speed while the other, 'Sancho', observes what happens from a safe distance before, during and after the impact, to gather information on the NEO's internal structure. This will also test possible future mitigation techniques, such as whether 'Hidalgo' could be programmed to hit the asteroid to change its orbit so that it avoids collision with the Earth.
Earthguard 1: A spacecraft using propulsion technology such as solar sails or electric propulsion, or 'hitching a ride' on a future launch, would be placed in a heliocentric orbit to observe NEOs from a more favourable viewpoint.
ISHTAR: This would probe the interior of an NEO to study its structure and assess the danger with radar tomography, a new technology that uses ground penetrating radar to make images of the interior of a solid body.
SIMONE: A fleet of low-cost small satellites would fly by and/or rendezvous with a number of NEOs to characterise the population and obtain first hand information on the hazardous objects.
EUNEOS: A space survey would be undertaken from an inner solar system orbit to find the most dangerous NEOs. These are often the most difficult to observe from ground-based observatories as very often these faint objects only appear in the daytime sky or very close to the horizon.
Remote observation of NEOs from Space: A space-based observatory to carry out remote sensing and detect physical characteristics of NEOs, such as size, composition and surface properties.
Andrea Carusi, President of the Spaceguard Foundation, believes "it is very important that ESA, one of the largest space agencies, and one that is already deeply involved in support of NEO studies, has decided to take a further step in this direction".
Preliminary studies, funded by the Agency's General Studies Programme, are now under way for the six proposals. Once these are submitted in 2003, ESA will judge whether one or more of the proposed missions is feasible and merits further development.
More info: Spaceflight Now Article
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