Overview

Goal: To develop a software tool to select a near earth asteroid for resource extraction given only data on known orbits and search criteria provided by the user, i.e. delta-v, mining season, mission duration, asteroid type.

Updates

I found a great new resource which is the Space and Robotics convention which is actually two different conventions. Robotics for Challenging Situtations which has been biannually held since '94 and Engineering, Construction, Operations, and Business in Space held since '88. The proceedings publications are great resources for abstracts relating to the area of space development. I've got about 4 so far from the university library, but there's 8 more.

You can buy them from the ASCE website here.

Software Found - February 19th, 2002

I found a great piece of software that does rudimentary asteroid plotting give n MPC data. And its wri tten in Java too!

Research Update - July 2nd, 2001

I have been extensively studying orbital mechanics so that I might have a better understanding of what the criteria for a suitable mining target are. Once I have done this, I will have to determine if a simple equation or an iterative analysis is necessary to locate targets. I highly suspect the latter from my initial glimpse of the math involved.

Here is a summary of my current findings.