49th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference 2018 (LPI Contrib. No. 2083) 2217.pdf NEA SCOUT-X: A COST-EFFECTIVE MISSION PERFORMING FLYBYS OF MULTIPLE NEAR- EARTH ASTEORIDS AND RENDEZVOUS. R. Sood1, J. Pezent1 and A. Heaton2, 1Astrodynamics and Space Research Laboratory, Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics, The University of Alabama, Tusca- loosa, AL 35487, USA (
[email protected]); 2NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL 35812, USA. Introduction: As a part of NASA’s Exploration range of states past the Moon’s orbit at which point the Mission One (EM-1), thirteen low-cost CubeSats were sail is fully deployed and can be leveraged to perform selected as secondary payloads to be launched with the adequate attitude maneuvers. Trajectories correspond- Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle. With the delay in ing to possible initial position states are spread be- the launch of EM-1, NASA’s Near Earth Asteroid tween December 17, 2019 and January 16, 2020 as (NEA) Scout mission has gone through a number of illustrated in Figure 1. iterations. NEA Scout spacecraft is a 6U CubeSat that employs a solar sail as a low-thrust propulsion system to perform a close flyby of asteroid 1991 VG [1]. Alt- hough mission analysis shows that the target asteroid is still within the reach despite a two-year delay, setting the launch date no earlier than December 2019, alter- nate targets have also been considered. In the current investigation, contingency scenarios for NEA Scout mission are explored. Several additional candidate as- teroids, that are of significant interest to the scientific community are also investigated as potential alternate targets.