Instrumentation for an asteroid kinetic-impactor demonstration mission

Kurzfassung

For selecting instruments to fulfill the objectives of a mission to impact an asteroid, it is important to get an idea of the effects of such an impact event. Therefore the expected crater and ejecta cloud have to be calculated. The calculations need to take into consideration the properties of the asteroid as well as the impactor. The main objective of the NEOTwIST mission is to transfer angular momentum by impacting the asteroid far from the rotation axis to change the rotation period as well as observe the resulting ejecta cloud and possibly the crater. There are three different mission concepts, the 1st includes only an impactor spacecraft, the 2nd adds a flyby subunit the 3rd one to two chasers. Due to the fact that the three concepts have different mission objectives the instrumentation of the concepts are different.