[X] My Assistant

[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?