Abstract
Delivering critical science by enabling small interplanetary missions beyond Mars
Highlights
The main asteroid belt is rich with potential targets for spacecraft investigations
The diversity of asteroids requires many objects to be visited with spacecraft in order to understand the nature of different asteroids, how they are related to small bodies on more distant orbits, the conditions that led to their formation and scattering, their role in altering the surfaces and compositions of planets and moons, and why some asteroids appear to be active
The Janus mission to fly by two binary near-Earth asteroids at ~1 AU and the ESCAPADE mission to Mars are addressing challenges posed by traveling beyond the Earth-Moon system with an ESPA-limited, ride share spacecraft. @fWith these advances, we are incredibly close to accessing the main belt, with its numerous potential targets, and exploring these bodies with instrumentation that can probe from the deep interior to the surface, within the constraints of the current SIMPLEx program
Summary
The main asteroid belt is rich with potential targets for spacecraft investigations. Earth-based observing assets have shown that the composition of bodies in the main belt change with distance from the Sun (e.g. DeMeo and Carey, 2014; Figure 1) – from rocky, silicate-rich S-. @fWith these advances, we are incredibly close to accessing the main belt, with its numerous potential targets, and exploring these bodies with instrumentation that can probe from the deep interior to the surface, within the constraints of the current SIMPLEx program. These missions provide many more opportunities for exploration and a cost-effective way of connecting the targets of Discovery and New Frontiers missions with similar bodies closer to home, leveraging all we have learned in those programs. Addressing the technology gaps limiting small spacecraft missions beyond Mars, as well as the programmatic limits currently imposed, could usher in a new era of low cost exploration to the asteroid belt and feed forward into similar cost missions to even more distant targets
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More From: Vol. 53, Issue 4 (Planetary/Astrobiology Decadal Survey Whitepapers)
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