The Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) is a candidate mission currently undergoing preliminary design work (phase B1). The mission concept is being consolidated in view of a potential discussion at ESA’s Council of Ministers in December 2016 for approval.
Launched in October 2020, AIM would travel to a binary asteroid system – the paired Didymos asteroids, which will come a comparatively close 11 million km to Earth in 2022. The 800 m-diameter main body is orbited by a 170 m moon, informally called ‘Didymoon’.
This smaller body is AIM’s focus: the spacecraft would perform high-resolution visual, thermal and radar mapping of the moon to build detailed maps of its surface and interior structure.
The main AIM spacecraft is planned to carry at least three smaller spacecraft – the Mascot-2 asteroid lander, being provided by DLR (Mascot-1 is already flying on JAXA’s Hayabusa-2), as well as two or more CubeSats. AIM would test optical communications and inter-satellite links in deep space, essential technology for future exploration.
If approved, AIM would also be Europe’s contribution to the larger Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment mission: AIDA. In late 2022, the NASA-led part of AIDA will arrive: the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, probe will approach the binary system – then crash straight into the asteroid moon at about 6 km/s.
AIM is intended to be watching closely as DART hits Didymoon. In the aftermath, it will perform detailed before-and-after comparisons on the structure of the body itself, as well as its orbit, to characterise DART’s kinetic impact and its consequences.
Read more about AIM:
http://www.esa.int/aim
Credit: ESA/ScienceOffice.org
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| ESA’s proposed Asteroid Impact Mission to the Didymos binary asteroid system will carry two ‘CubeSat Opportunity Payloads (COPINS)’ to support the science goals of the main spacecraft plus its lander, as well demonstrate deep space inter-satellite link techniques. |
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