Abstract Near-Earth asteroids pose a considerable threat to the safety of the Earth, where their impact would cause a huge disaster. For asteroid deflection, kinetic impact is an effective strategy. In this study, a smooth particle hydrodynamics approach is proposed to analyze the kinetic impact, considering the number, shape, size, and speed of the impactors. The simulation results demonstrate that the shape of the impactor will affect the deflection effect. The bullet-shaped impactor will result in larger velocity increment of the asteroid. Compared with a single impactor, multiple impactors with same total mass can deliver more momentum to the asteroid. Moreover, the velocity increment caused by multi-kinetic impactors are much larger. However, the number of multiple impactors have no significant influence on the momentum enhancement factor, which describes the efficiency of momentum transfer. When the total mass of impactors is the same, the momentum enhancement factor is mainly related to the impactspeed and the ejecta from theimpact. Therefore, the momentum enhancement factor is a composite indicator of both the destructiveness and deflection effects of an impact. For multiple kinetic impacts, the case with different shapes and different speeds gains a bigger momentum enhancement factor.
Effectiveness analysis of multiple kinetic impacts of near-Earth asteroids
Advances in Space Research ; 69 , 7 ; 2883-2892
2022-01-18
10 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
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