Multi-organization — Multi-discipline effort developing a mitigation concept for planetary defense

There have been significant recent efforts in addressing mitigation approaches to neutralize Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHA). One such research effort was performed in 2015 by an integrated, inter-disciplinary team of asteroid scientists, energy deposition modeling scientists, payload engineers, orbital dynamicist engineers, spacecraft discipline engineers, and systems / architecture engineers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and the Department of Energy (DoE) / National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) laboratories (Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) and Sandia National Laboratories). The study team collaborated with GSFC's Integrated Design Center's Mission Design Lab (MDL) which engaged a team of GSFC flight hardware discipline engineers to work with GSFC, LANL, and LLNL Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA)-related subject matter experts during a one-week intensive concept formulation study in an integrated concurrent engineering environment. This team has analyzed the first of several distinct study cases for a multi-year NASA research grant. This Case 1 study references the NEA named Bennu as the notional target due to the availability of a very detailed Design Reference Asteroid (DRA) model for its orbit and physical characteristics (courtesy of the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer [OSIRIS-REx] mission team). The research involved the formulation and optimization of spacecraft trajectories to intercept Bennu, overall mission and architecture concepts, and high-fidelity modeling of both kinetic impact (spacecraft collision to change a NEA's momentum and orbit) and nuclear detonation effects on Bennu, for purposes of deflecting Bennu.