This project is solving the Asteroid Hunter challenge.
This project proposes to not only tag and track Apophis, that happens to be on a high-risk orbit, but find other, smaller ones with also a significant threat, but which we humans don't know yet.
The proposal contains a mission description of affordable, open-source cubesats (the parallel challenge ArduSat is a great platform!), that will creat a swarm of infrared "eyes" to spot the intrinsic thermal radiation of the main belt objects.
We should be able to design cubesats for interplanetary travel, hitch hiking to Mars as part of the ballast weight (other parallel challenge!), which then spawns the swarm and they travel independently on to their locations (Lagrange orbits of Mars)
The scientific instrumentation will be deployable, passively cooled IR telescopes with microbolometer sensors and band pass filters for 10 and 18 microns wavelength, allowing to probe the peak ranges of the asteroid radiation. This way one overcomes the low albedo in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Project Information
License: GNU General Public LicenseSource Code/Project URL: https://github.com/spaceappchile/team10