Tiny NEA Scout Solar Sail Mission to Chase Asteroid

this April is a small, shoebox-sized mission mission that with use an innovative solar sail technology, to chase down a school-bus sized asteroid.. Folded up and stowed away, the entire payload fits in a small 10 cm x 20 cm x 30 cm 6U cubesat. Once in space and unfurled, the tiny spacecraft will deploy solar panels for power, and four 7.3-meter long rods will support a 9.3-meter square sail for maneuvering and propulsion.

“Thanks to the introduction of new observatories over the past decade and the help of the astronomical community, we’ve always had a couple of targets available for any launch window.”during the September 8th, 2023 close pass for flyby, when the asteroid is 0.038 AU from the Earth. This will be the smallest target ever visited, and a 30 meters per second, the slowest asteroid flyby yet.

“2020 GE is between 5-15 meters large, so one at least one order of magnitude smaller than Hayabusa’s target Itokawa .” Says Castillo-Rogez. “As another point of comparison, the OSIRIS-REx target Bennu is about 510 meters in its smallest dimension.”was developed by NASA’s Advanced Explorations Systems Division at the Marshall Spaceflight Center, to test key technologies in a small package.

“NEAScout will carry a small imager. Its mass is about 1 lbs. Although it is very small, we demonstrated that its performance meets our requirements for science observations.” Says Castillo-Rogez. “We will launch in the Spring, spend a few months in the Earth-Moon region and start the interplanetary cruise in August 2022 . The flyby of the target will be in November 2023. We will start searching for it about one month prior to encounter.

To be sure, Artemis-1 and the inaugural launch of SLS will be a historic one, and a first step in humanity’s return to the Moon. NEA Scout is one of 10 smallsat missions taking advantage of the Artemis 1 launch, headed out into cis-lunar space and back.As of writing this, SLS is slated to launch in April 8th-22nd, with a backup window in May from the 7th-21st 2022. The NEA Scout and other smallsat payloads are tucked away inside the Orion stage ring adapter of the booster.

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