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NASA/JPL NEO Deflection App

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NEO Deflection App

Welcome to the NASA/JPL NEO Deflection App (NDA), a web-based interactive tool produced in collaboration with the Aerospace Corporation. This app is designed to provide insight into the problem of deflecting a threatening asteroid using impulsive asteroid deflection, with special emphasis on using a Kinetic Impactor (KI) mission. Given a simulated asteroid on an Earth impact trajectory, the app can answer such questions as:

  • What are the best times to deflect the asteroid?
  • How much velocity change is required to make the asteroid miss the Earth?
  • When could an impactor spacecraft be launched in order to intercept the asteroid?
  • What is the maximum size of asteroid that can be deflected with a single launch?
  • In which direction will the asteroid be deflected most easily?

The hypothetical asteroids created for the impact threat exercises at the 2015 and 2017 Planetary Defense Conferences (PDCs) have been loaded into the app. The starting estimate for the threat exercise at the upcoming 2017 PDC meeting is named PDC17 in the pulldown list of objects. Over a dozen other simulated impacting asteroid trajectories are also available for study.

Note: The objects loaded into this app are not real: they are all hypothetical, simulated asteroids. The trajectories and deflection calculations, however, use entirely realistic mathematical models.

Credits

Development of the NEO Deflection App was sponsored by NASA’s Planetary Science Division, Science Mission Directorate, was led by the NEO Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and was implemented by The Aerospace Corporation (TAC). Don Yeomans (JPL) defined the requirements and provided overall guidance in this project; Paul Chodas (JPL) designed the hypothetical cases, numerically integrated the trajectories, and generated the coefficient tables that are pre-loaded into the app; and Nahum Melamed (TAC) led the Aerospace systems engineering team that designed, developed and verified the app and its web interface.

Team members involved in the project were:

  • JPL: Don Yeomans, Paul Chodas, Alan Chamberlin, Steve Chesley, Jon Giorgini, and Damon Landau.
  • Aerospace Corporation: Nahum Melamed, Jason Anderson, Jason Stout, Eyal Amir and Bill Ailor.