The NEOShield Project: Understanding the mitigation-relevant physical properties of potentially hazardous asteroids

Abstract

NEOShield is a European-Union funded project to address impact hazard mitigation issues, coordinated by the German Aerospace Center, DLR. The NEOShield consortium consists of 13 research institutes, universities, and industrial partners from 6 countries and includes leading US and Russian space organizations. The primary aim of the 5.8 million euro, 3.5 year project, which commenced in January 2012, is to investigate in detail promising mitigation techniques, such as the kinetic impactor, blast deflection, and the gravity tractor, and devise feasible demonstration missions. Options for an international strategy for implementation when an actual impact threat arises will also be investigated. Our current scientific work is focused on examining the mitigation-relevant physical properties of the NEO population via observational data and laboratory experiments on asteroid surface analog materials. We are attempting to narrow the range of the expected properties of objects that are most likely to threaten the Earth and trigger space-borne mitigation attempts, and investigate how such objects would respond to different mitigation techniques. The results of our scientific work will flow into the technical phase of the project, during which detailed designs of feasible mitigation demonstration missions will be developed. We briefly describe the scope of the project and report on results obtained to date. Funded under EU FP7 program agreement no. 282703.