ESA Plans Test of Asteroid Defense System

vinlud writes "It has been announced by Dutch television ESA has chosen the Don Quijote programme to investigate the possibilities of altering the collision course of asteroids heading for Earth. The program, selected among five other studies, contains two spacecraft: Hidalgo and Sancho. Hidalgo will impact an asteroid of approximately 500 m diameter at a relative speed of at least 10 km/s while Sancho will retreat to a safe distance to observe the impact. An animation of the mission sequence (6.49 Mb) can be downloaded from here."

Comments

Re:Direct link to 6MB file - clever

[Jugalator]

Better link, maybe?

It's All in the name

[Count of Montecristo]

While there will be incessant puns about the characters that this project is named after; given the fact that in the book, Don Quixote was out of his mind, I feel it is very appropriate, since it describes excactly what it does.

Perhaps the most famous part of this book is when Don Quixote gallantly charged at windmills, while Sancho watched. In his troubled mind, The windmills were evil Giants, which he sought to destroy to win the favors of his sweethart Dulcinea, wich is a very accurate depiction of what the program is supposed to do.

I find that the depiction, regardless of the obvious fact that in the book it was a hopeless cause; is a romantic metaphore, rather than an endorsement of failure, poor engineering or idealistic but unreachable goals.

As a side note, this book (El ingenioso Hidalgo, Don Quixote de la Mancha) is to the Spanish Language as The Count of Montecristo is to French, Luther's New testament translation is to German, and the works of Shakespeare are to English.

objectives

[kyknos.org]

The mission has a very high scientific value, but it will also help in testing technologies required for future deflection missions and raise interest in people for space exploration. The mission will in particular: measure the mass of the asteroid, the ratio of the moments of inertia and the low order harmonics of its gravity field. model the asteroid shape before and after the impact, to detect changes (if any). determine the asteroid internal structure, especially the size the main solid pieces, the average particle size and thickness of regolith and of the debris layers in the space left between the main pieces. constrain the mechanical properties of the asteroid material. measure the orbital deflection of the asteroid as a result of the impact of Hidalgo measure the asteroid rotation state before and immediately after the impact. detect the dissipation of the non-principal axis rotation after the impact. determine the asteroid large scale mineralogical composition.