Multiple Small-Body Encounters, Past & Future Options

[TheAnt]

Thank you Yaohua for this information. A proposal to get 3 asteroids visited with one mission could make that attractive that the proposal might get a go ahead.

MOD NOTE: Follow-on discussion re multiple encounters moved here.

[vjkane]

MOD NOTE: New topic split from previous posts here.

A proposal to get 3 asteroids visited with one mission could make that attractive that the proposal might get a go ahead.

There have been various concepts in the US planetary community for similar missions. I'm not sure if any made it to the status of formal proposals to the Discovery program. Eventually some space agency is likely to do this.

[Explorer1]

I wonder how many asteroid encounters would be possible for a space-crafting going retrograde around the sun; delta-v issues aside, couldn't a huge number of flybys happened in close succession, with a kind of 'running into the rain' effect? Since Ulysses got into a polar orbit with a flyby of Jupiter, couldn't the planet fling something else right around? Or would it require multiple flybys over decades?

[JRehling]

I imagine someone came up with the idea before I did, but I mentioned the idea of a retrograde asteroid belt mission years ago:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/lofiver....php/t4087.html

The devil's in the details as to how you could find a path to optimize the number of close flybys. I think the key idea is not to pick ten asteroids and ask how to visit them but to consider the set of >10K asteroids and see which retrograde orbit out of the almost infinite permutations visits the largest number of asteroids.

The value of such a mission would be a function of how diverse the asteroids are. If every asteroid visited falls into four types, you may as well just visit four asteroids. If there's some stunning surprise there that you see in a quick/close encounter with the Kth asteroid, then you want to visit K asteroids, where K may be high.

More discussion at that linked thread.