Spacecraft could provide an early warning system for the vast majority of dangerous asteroids.
, asteroids that are larger than about 500 feet in diameter and that come within about 4.65 million miles of Earth are considered potentially hazardous.To monitor and assess these potential threats, a team led by Li Xiangyu of the School of Aerospace Engineering at the Beijing Institute of Technology , along with collaborators from BIT and the China Academy of Space Technology, has proposed launching a constellation of satellites close to Venus in planetary defense efforts.
The proposed CROWN mission would employ a surveillance constellation of six heterogeneous wide-field near-Earth surveyors and a parent spacecraft to detect, track and provide an early warning system for potentially hazardous asteroids. After releasing the surveyors equipped with optical telescopes, the parent spacecraft would be positioned at a gravitationally stable sun-Venus Lagrange point orbit to facilitate relay communication.
The researchers found that Venus-like orbits provided better coverage over the space inside Earth's orbit than a surveyor at sun-Earth Lagrange point 1, a gravitationally stable point about 932,000 miles inside the Earth's orbit, and were energetically easier to achieve than
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