Trailing formations of lightweight spacecrafts to deflect NEAs by means of laser ablation

Abstract

We introduce a method that enables swarms of lightweight spacecrafts to correctly set up trailing formations that would allow to successfully perform continuous shooting actions aimed at deflecting NEAs by means of laser ablation. The method uses a computational procedure that provides post-Newtonian (p-N) data necessary to build up these formations, as well as to efficiently control the spacecrafts in the swarms. In fact, these data allow to coordinately shoot at cataloged NEAs and are therefore essential for the multiple action laser methods to become the most effective to deflect NEAs (if we exclude, obviously, the destructive methods). For it turns out that these data provide significant corrections to the shooting spots and instants predicted with the current formulae. The reason is that both the equations for the relative motions and the control formulae take into account (for the first time) the gravitational gradients from the spacecrafts to the NEAs.