New Technologies and Strategies to Exploit Near Earth Asteroids for Breakthrough Space Development

The past two decades have brought a profound expansion of knowledge of near earth objects (NEO). If creatively exploited, NEOs can significantly increase human safety while reducing costs of exploration and development of the moon, Mars and the solar system. Synergistically, the ability to defend the Earth from devastating impacts will become very effective.A spherical volume having a radius equivalent to the moon’s orbit, 400,000 km, is visited every day by approximately ten NEOs having diameters of ∼10 meters, while ∼30 meter diameter encounters occur about once per month. Because these objects are usually very faint and only within detectable range for a few days, they require specialized equipment to discover them with high probability of detection and to enable accurate determination of orbital parameters. Survey systems are now being implemented that are cataloging many thousands of objects larger than 30 meters, but numerous advantages will result from extending the complete NEO census down to 10 m...