Lately, humanity has visited a number of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), together with Ryugu (Hayabusa2) and Didymos (DART). Nevertheless, we are going to want extra frequent missions to start out gathering extra useful details about this class of over 37,000 house rocks. CubeSats have off-the-shelf parts and a comparatively small measurement, making them a probably good candidate for such an exploration program. However how would they attain these asteroid places given their comparatively restricted payload and propulsion capability? That’s the focus of a brand new paper from Alessandro Quarta of the College of Pisa. He appears to be like at potential trajectory planning for CubeSats given one in every of a number of configurations of ion drives. He exhibits what number of NEAs may be accessed by merely coming into a heliocentric orbit and awaiting the asteroid’s arrival as a part of its orbit.
