Abstract
Potential Earth impact hazards posed by near Earth objects have motivated researchers to propose hazard mitigation techniques to deflect the near Earth objects from their Earth-crossing orbits. There are several methods suggested in the literature to perturb the motion of a near Earth object, ranging from the nuclear explosions to the use of solar sails and direct impact. One of the effective nonnuclear techniques is the attachment of a tether and ballast to the asteroid to alter its trajectory; hence, in this paper, the effect of attaching a tether and ballast mass to the asteroid and then cutting the tether at an appropriate time is investigated. The instant of cutting the tether is of crucial importance and is determined via the simulated annealing optimization technique. The dynamic characteristics of the optimum tether cut point are also studied in this paper. It is shown that there exist only a few candidates for the optimum tether cut time.
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