Asteroid Target Selection and Orbital Manipulation Sensitivity for Deflection Demonstration Missions

In recent years, space agencies have begun to seriously consider launching demonstration missions to test some of the asteroid orbital deflection technologies and methods that have been studied and discussed in the scientific literature. Consequently, several mission studies have already been carried out. This paper attempts to gain new insights into the target selection process by analyzing the orbital evolution of a large set of notional accessible asteroids that cover all types of Near Earth Object families. The evolution of their unperturbed orbits and their anthropogenically modified trajectories was compared, and a measure of the resilience of a given orbit to anthropogenic manipulation was taken (i.e., orbital innocuity). The results show that pruning criteria such as considering only Amor objects (i.e., non-Earth-crossers) reduce unnecessarily the population of potential suitable targets and that within large regions of Earth-crossing orbital space asteroids can be found that are both accessible and safe to manipulate from the standpoint of the Earth impact risk.