Space Missions to Asteroids

Asteroids represent a significant resource for space exploration and scientific research. Various scientific missions have already performed and planned to investigate and understand the characteristics of asteroids. This talk introduces many space missions to asteroids. Representing missions to asteroids are the NASA's NEAR, Deep Space-1, Dawn, OSIRIS-Rex, SCOUT, DART, and ESA's Rosetta, and JAXA's Hayabusa 1 and 2, and DESTINY+ missions, and others. Although it is a very rare event, the possibility of Earth-crossing asteroids (ECAs) colliding with the Earth can never also be ignored. Numerous mitigation concepts also have been proposed to deflect ECAs in preparing for the disasters which might occur in future days. In the early studies for mitigation schemes, most of analyses were centered on to deflect ECAs with impacting the energy to the object to change its orbit. This talk also introduces many methods to deflect the orbit of ECAs, and shows spacecraft trajectories to asteroids.