An architecture for mitigating near earth object's impact to the earth

Abstract

Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), like species extinction events, present a great threat to our home planet and human kind. The motivation of designing this architectural framework is the current lack of structured architecture for the process of detecting, characterizing and mitigating these NEO threats. Due to the recent establishment of the NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), it is critical to link the individual facilities conducting separate research with an objective of forming a clearly defined collaborative system based on data reporting and sharing. The architectural framework is designed for integrating the process of detecting, characterizing and mitigating NEO threats. The goal of designing the architecture is to organize current data and resources into useful information and correlate that information with the goals of the NEO mitigation study. The architectural framework will enable scientists, organizations, and decision makers to locate, identify and resolve semantic confusion, properties, facts, constraints and issues with potentially hazardous asteroids. Our major focus is to design the data and information flow that models the complete process from NEO detection, to designing the mitigation strategies. A secondary focus is to develop a system-of-systems architecture to describe the supporting infrastructure for the framework. The framework is also built with the opportunity to leverage future assets from the broader Planetary Defense (PD) community, and identify/speed up relevant PD research and response.i