Asteroid Mission Competition Announces Winner

Riding with Robots writes "The Planetary Society invited participants to compete for $50,000 in prizes by designing a mission to rendezvous with and 'tag' a potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroid. The asteroid Apophis was used as the target for the mission design because it will come closer to Earth in 2029 than the orbit of geostationary satellites. The winning mission design is called Foresight, and calls for the use of off-the-shelf parts to undercut the price of other proposals. Here's a PDF of the winning proposal."

Re:Huh?

[Kostya]

COTS means ready-made components, with very little custom parts or systems. Most gear sent into space is custom designed for the task (down to custom circuits, boards, and even processors). The Mars rovers were the first project to use COTS hardware (I believe their modems were COTS for example), and it saved a bunch compared with how they would usually build a similar system.

So yes, building this with available components and not using custom-designed circuit boards and parts could significantly save money.

Re:Interesting name...

[TypoNAM]

That was actually Anubis [gateworld.net] in Fail Safe of season five.

Re:Interesting name...

[Talderas]

No, Apophis just was going to invade Earth, bombing us back into the bronze age. Anubis was the one that used the Asteroid to try to hit Earth. Apparently he had seen all our Armageddon type movies, and the asteroid he used was mostly Naquaada, meaning the use of a nuclear weapon to divert or split the asteroid would have resulted in the asteroid becoming a huge explosion that would have likely engulfed Earth in the blast.

Re:Interesting name...

[downix]

Apophis, also called Apep, is the egyptian worldsnake, desiring to consume the sun and destroy all life. It was fought each day by the god Set, to protect the sun god Ra, as he made his way through the underworld. But yet, despite being killed every day, it continually ressurects to threaten again the next day.

Re:Another Asteriod Mission

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear warheads aren't really the best way to "steer" asteroids. Ask Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_deflection_strategies [wikipedia.org]

Executive Summary

[Atticka]

Executive summary from the the linked PDF:

The Foresight spacecraft is a concept design for a radio tagging mission to Near Earth
Asteroid (NEO) Apophis. The spacecraft is designed to be a low-cost, low-risk, minimal
science mission in order to achieve the goal of obtaining accurate tracking information for
Apophis. The baseline spacecraft mission includes a launch from Wallops Island, Virginia on
an Orbital Sciences Corporation Minotaur IV launch vehicle. Five launch windows have
been identified spanning the years 2012 to 2014. The mission requires a chemical propulsive
transfer vehicle to perform the outbound burn to Apophis (3,600 m/s) with the Foresight
encounter spacecraft performing a portion of the Earth departure, and the Apophis capture
burn (total less than 2,400 m/s). The mass of the Foresight spacecraft is 220 kg (propulsive
transfer vehicle of 1,387 kg). The Foresight spacecraft is powered by solar arrays augmented
by rechargeable batteries; the transfer vehicle is powered by onboard batteries. The
Spacecraft has two main instruments, a multi-spectral imager and laser altimeter, which
over a span of 300 days reduces the ±3 error ellipse of Apophis' trajectory ("keyhole" or bplace
encounter) in 2029 to 6.0 kilometers by 2017. The spacecraft leverages off the shelf
technologies where possible, incorporating leaner approaches to spacecraft design. The total
cost for this mission is estimated to be $137.2 M ($94.2 M for spacecraft and instrument
development and acquisition, $21 M for operations, and $22 M for the launch vehicle).
Overall system reliability is estimated to be 90.2%. The Foresight spacecraft is a low cost
asteroid spacecraft mission that can be implemented with low risk in order to obtain detailed
information on the future orbital trajectory of Apophis.