AIM and its CubeSats watch DART's impact on Didymos. (Image courtesy of ESA)
The Rosetta spacecraft achieved a number of notable firsts when it reached Comet Chryumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. It was the first spacecraft to orbit a comet nucleus and its lander Philae obtained the first images taken from a comet’s surface.
Now the European Space Agency (ESA) is considering using a swarm of tiny spacecraft for an even more ambitious project: studying the kinetic effects of crashing an impactor spacecraft into an asteroid moon.
The Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission is a joint effort between NASA and ESA. It combines NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) and ESA’s Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM).The proposal is to launch AIM in October 2020, followed by DART in July 2021. AIM will orbit and study the binary asteroid 65803 Didymos and its moon while waiting for DART to arrive. DART will then impact the asteroid moon in October 2022 while AIM monitors the effects of the impact on the moon’s orbit.
The “Pixie landers” or ‘femtospacecraft”, developed by Asteroid Initiatives, are CubeSats weighing only 40 grams (less than 1.5 ounces). In order to study the asteroid system before and after DART’s impact, AIM would release 40 Pixie landers to blanket the moon with a variety of sensors. The Pixies would be carried by a larger 3-U “Bradbury” CubeSat launched from the main AIM spacecraft.
Since they work as a swarm, the Pixies have a few benefits, including:
- The ability to describe surface properties with greater accuracy
- Protection against the malfunction or loss of individuals
- The ability to transfer data between members
AIM networking with CubeSats. (Image courtesy of ESA)
"We are excited at the possibility of applying our femtospacecraft technology to help further planetary defense and also in furthering the development of technology that will be crucial to future asteroid exploration and asteroid mining," said Charles Radley, chief technical officer at Asteroid Initiatives.
The Pixie landers are part of the Asteroid Geological Explorer (AGEX), one of five candidate designs being considered for the mission.
Asteroid Initiatives is currently seeking university partners to develop instrumentation for its Pixie landers. For more information, visit the AIDA mission website.