Speaker
Description
The growing interest in missions targeting small bodies and near-Earth asteroids, driven by planetary defence, exploration and resource-utilization objectives, calls for space systems capable of operating in asteroid environments that are often not well characterized, or that present large uncertainties during the mission design phases.
In this presentation one interesting example of such asteroids is considered, 99942 Apophis, mainly known for its 13th April 2029 Earth Closest Approach (ECA). The thermal environment of the asteroid is analysed, with particular emphasis on the ECA period, to identify the challenges of a possible surface landing mission.
A parametric Python-based framework for conducting preliminary assessments of the environments of Non-Principal Axis tumbling asteroids is developed, with a flexible approach to uncertainties in dynamic, physical and thermal properties.
An application to the Apophis case study, considering its peculiar spin state, is shown, with the objective of deriving high level thermal constraints and requirements for a surface mission. A first manual search of the domain space of the principal unknowns is conducted, based on the selection of worst-case scenarios in terms of illumination conditions and surface temperature distribution; then a parallel computing (GPU accelerated) Monte Carlo stochastic search is implemented, to understand the most influential parameters related to the thermal operability of a landed spacecraft.
Ultimately, the integration of more powerful third-party software within the developed framework is discussed, with special attention to Thermal Desktop modeling.
