Stardust project

• Stardust unlocked the secrets of chaos and resonances in Earth orbit mapping regions of the space around the Earth where motion is chaotic and can lead to a fast decay of the orbit. These key results were instrumental to define passive debris deorbiting strategies and ‘deorbiting highways’ that accelerate the orbit decay.
• Stardust developed new fast approaches for preliminary orbit determination of asteroids and space debris that will allow the treatment of large databases and the determination of the orbits of objects starting from sparse measurements.
• Stardust introduced new techniques for the detumbling of space debris and asteroids using Eddy currents or laser ablation. It demonstrated the effectiveness of these technologies and their applicability to real mission scenarios.
• Stardust produced substantial advancements on the use of laser ablation for debris removal and asteroid manipulation and exploitation. It demonstrated, theoretically and experimentally, that this technique offers an effective and versatile solution, in many cases superior to most slow-push deflection methods.
• Stardust introduced new asteroid deflection concepts, like the Nuclear Cycler that allows for a more controllable deflection using a series of nuclear explosions, and delivered new insights in the applicability of other known deflection methods like the kinetic impactor and the gravity tractor.
• Stardust introduced the quantification of uncertainty in the study of the entry and demise of space debris and asteroids, and developed new fast and open source tools and methods to estimate the risk of an impact on ground. All these new advancements contributed to the development of an open source tool called FOSTRAD, freely available on request.
• Stardust developed new tools to allow decision makers to make informed decisions on the potential consequences of an impact with an asteroid. The software ARMOR was developed to quantify the total risk and damage on Earth.