A Comprehensive Ongoing Survey of the Near-Earth Asteroid Population for Human Mission Accessibility

There are currently 7069 known Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and more are being discovered on a continual basis; it is likely that the total NEA population consists of at least hundreds of thousands of objects. NEAs have orbits that bring them into close proximity with Earth’s orbit, making them both a unique hazard to life on Earth and a unique opportunity for science and exploration. The current presidential administration has proposed that NASA send humans to an asteroid by the mid-2020s as part of the Flexible Path architecture. A study was therefore undertaken to identify NEAs that are accessible for round-trip human missions using a heavy-lift launch architecture. A fully parametrized, highly ecient algorithm was developed to accomplish this, allowing changes in vehicle parameters to be studied and enabling the accessibility analysis to keep pace with the NEA discovery rate, which is increasing as new telescopes, such as Pan-STARRS, become active. To date, the accessibility analysis algorithm has identied 59 accessible