study on the regularities of kinetic impact deflection for virtual asteroids impacting earth
- Paper ID
98177
- DOI
- author
- company
1: National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences; 2:University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
- country
China
- year
2025
- abstract
Asteroid impacts on Earth pose a potential threat that humanity must address. Current planetary defense research primarily focuses on individual asteroids, however, there are numerous potential hazardous asteroids (PHAs), many of which remain undiscovered. Among the known asteroids, most are not on a collision course with Earth or have an extremely low impact probability, resulting in a lack of research specifically targeting the characteristics of Earth-impacting asteroids. To address this issue, we first established a high-precision orbital dynamics model of the solar system, and generated a dataset of virtual Earth-impacting asteroids with orbital parameters matching the real PHAs population distribution. The characteristics of these asteroids were then analyzed. Subsequently, we employed the CZ-5 launch vehicle to establish an Earth-to-asteroid transfer trajectory model and optimized the launch and transfer windows for each virtual asteroid. Additionally, within the high-precision orbital dynamics model, we computed asteroid impact parameters and assessed the deflection effectiveness. Finally, based on the optimization results, we analyzed the proportion of asteroids that could be deflected by one Earth radius under early warning times of 20, 15, 10, and 5 years. We also investigated the maximum achievable deflection distance under varying early warning times. Furthermore, we examined the impact of parameters such as spacecraft transfer orbit inclination, the distance between the impact point and the ecliptic plane, velocity increments in different asteroid trajectory directions, and the phase difference between the impact point and Earth on deflection performance, summarizing the characteristics of asteroids that are particularly difficult to deflect. Based on these analyses, we propose kinetic impact deflection strategies for hazardous asteroids with different characteristics.