Asteroid Resource Map for Near-Earth Space

摘要

Most future concepts for the exploration and exploitation of space require a large initial mass in low Earth orbit.nDelivering this requiredmass fromthe Earth’s surface increases cost due to the large energy input necessary tomovenmass out of the Earth’s gravity well. An alternative is to search for resources in-situ among the near-Earth asteroidnpopulation. The near-Earth asteroid resources that could be transferred to a bound Earth orbit are determined bynintegrating the probability of finding asteroids inside the Keplerian orbital element space of the set of transfers withnan specific energy smaller than a given threshold. Transfers are defined by a series of impulsive maneuvers andncomputed using the patched-conic approximation. The results show that even moderately-low-energy transfersnenable access to a large mass of resources.