Distributed integrated navigation systems for planetary defense against asteroids

The main objectives of this paper are to give an interdisciplinary overview of the current status of the research on planetary defense against asteroids, which is a real challenge, and consider technical proposals on the development of a multilevel planetary defense system based on modern space technologies, providing for the application of projectile asteroids to deflect target asteroids’ trajectories and distributed integrated navigation systems, the navigation equipment of which is supposed to be installed on many different objects. The composition of such navigation systems and their accuracies are discussed. This work is based on the results obtained by the international Research Laboratory of Space Research, Technologies, Systems and Processes [1], founded at Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics (MIEM), Branch of Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2011. The project was supported by the grant of the Government of the Russian Federation (2011–2013) [2, 3]. We have also used pioneering ideas from the course of lectures Models of planetary defense[4], prepared at the Department of Mechanics and Mathematical Modeling, MIEM NRU HSE in 2014 [4].