1- Research Topic

The recent years have seen an increasing public awareness over the catastrophic consequences that would arise from the collision between even a small asteroid and the Earth. Building on those fears, mitigation concepts are being investigated by research teams around the world that aim to deflect the orbit of an asteroid safely away of its collision course with the Earth. A usual drawback of these methods is that they rely on the amount of propellant available at the beginning of the mission. The disruptive approach proposed by ablative-based concept is instead to use the material the target is made of in order to generate the required and controllable thrust. Using a the high-power density delivered by laser beam for instance, a tiny layer of material can be vaporized continuously and this in turn produces a controllable thrust on the object thanks to Newton’s third law. Moreover, in theory this concept also work for space debris. The objective in our work is to quantify and characterize the dependency of this thrust to the characteristics of the laser system as well as the material and dynamical properties of the target considered.

 
2- Main Results

In Nicolas et al. (SPIE, 2014), we showed how the important material parameters can be derived from existing thermochemical tables and showed a first experimental verification that the temperature during the ablation process is as expected by the model. In Nicolas et al. (SPIE, 2015), we extended the model to study the influence of the tumbling rate and out-of-axis thermal conduction processes on the global efficiency of the method. The model was also incorporated into an orbit propagation tool in order to demonstrate that, with a 7 years lead time, a laser requiring as less as 5kW of input power could deflect a 56m asteroid by more than 5 Earth radii. From the mission point of view, a medium-class mission could implement the requirements of the deflection scenario. In this paper, we also extended our model to the case the material is a thin piece of aluminium debris.


3- References

THIRY, Nicolas et VASILE, Massimiliano. Recent advances in laser ablation modelling for asteroid deflection methods. In : SPIE Optical Engineering+ Applications. International Society for Optics and Photonics, 2014. p. 922608-922608-13.

THIRY, Nicolas et VASILE, Massimiliano. Deflection of uncooperative targets using laser ablation. In : SPIE Optical Engineering+ Applications. International Society for Optics and Photonics, 2015. p. 96160X-96160X-16.

VETRISANO, Massimo, THIRY, Nicolas, et VASILE, Massimiliano. Detumbling large space debris via laser ablation. In : Aerospace Conference, 2015 IEEE. IEEE, 2015. p. 1-10.

VETRISANO, Massimo, THIRY, Nicolas, TARDIOLI, Chiara, et al.ASTEROID’S ORBIT AND ROTATIONAL CONTROL USING LASER ABLATION: TOWARDS HIGH FIDELITY MODELLING OF A DEFLECTION MISSION.