~20 M
Airburst
Local damage, like Chelyabinsk in 2013, which arrived unseen from the direction of the Sun.
MISSION 04.1 · PLANETARY DEFENSE
Find it early.
Move it gently.
Warning time is the most valuable resource in planetary defense. A push of 1 cm/s applied ten years before an impact moves the arrival point by about an Earth radius and a half. With one year of warning, the same miss needs ten times the push. So the survey comes first.
CONCEPT PHASE · YEARS-TO-DECADES TIMELINE
FIG. / FUNCTIONAL CHAIN
- surveyground, NEO Surveyor, Venus-region IR
- orbit determinationastrometry, radar, impact probability
- characterizereconnaissance flyby: mass, spin, composition
- decidenational and international bodies, months
- deflectkinetic impactor · tractor · standoff
- assessmeasure the change in period and Δv
WARNING
Years to decades
DEMONSTRATED
DART · ~33 min period change
BLIND SPOT
The sunward sky
THE THREATMost of the damage risk
Most of the damage risk
is still undiscovered.
Large objects are mostly catalogued. Smaller ones that could still destroy a city mostly are not.
≥ 140 M
Regional
Large-region devastation. The survey goal is to find 90 % of them; a large share are still undiscovered.
COMETS
Short warning
Long-period comets can arrive with months to a couple of years of notice, which drives the ready-interceptor concept.
THE ARCHITECTUREReuse what exists.
Reuse what exists.
Add what is missing.
This mission's share of the five layers.
L0 · Ground | Reuse: Rubin/LSST, ATLAS, Catalina, Pan-STARRS, ZTF, Goldstone radar, the Minor Planet Center, CNEOS Add: A deep-space radar to restore what was lost with Arecibo |
|---|---|
L1 · LEO | Reuse: Infrared tracking satellites that see meteors entering the atmosphere Add: Meteor and small-impactor alerts fed into the shared track picture |
L3 · Cislunar | Reuse: None Add: A fuelled interceptor parked in high Earth orbit, ready to go |
L4 · Heliocentric | Reuse: NEO Surveyor (launching 2027); the DART and Hera results Add: An infrared survey inside Earth's orbit near Venus; rapid reconnaissance flyby spacecraft |
THE DEFLECTION LADDERGentle first.
Gentle first.
Strong only when needed.
The choice depends on the object's size and how much warning there is.
KINETIC IMPACTOR
Demonstrated by DART. Suited to objects up to a few hundred metres with years of warning.
GRAVITY TRACTOR
Slow and precise: trims the orbit and steers it away from keyholes after an impact.
ION-BEAM SHEPHERD
Pushes continuously without contact, using a spacecraft's exhaust plume.
STANDOFF BURST
A last resort for large objects or short warning. We model the physics only; policy decides.
THE STANDARD
Open tools. Traceable evidence.
Concept phase: these are aims, not results.
An architecture is a hypothesis until a reproducible trade study says otherwise.
Every number on these pages is a planning estimate from public sources. The program's job is to replace each one with a traceable result from open analysis tools: stated assumptions, the tool version, the inputs, and the output. The work uses public, unclassified sources only.