PROJECT SUMMARY: Foresight
The Foresight spacecraft is a concept design for a radio tagging mission to Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) Apophis. The spacecraft is designed to be a low-cost, low-risk, minimal science mission in order to achieve the goal of obtaining accurate tracking information for Apophis. Five launch windows have been identified spanning the years 2012 to 2014 for the Minotaur IV launch vehicle. The mission requires a chemical propulsive transfer vehicle to perform the outbound burn to Apophis (3,600 m/s) with the Foresight encounter spacecraft performing a portion of the Earth departure, and the Apophis capture burn (total less than 2,400 m/s). The mass of the Foresight spacecraft is 220 kg while the propulsive transfer vehicle is 1,387 kg. The solar powered spacecraft has two main instruments, a multi-spectral imager and laser altimeter, which over a span of 300 days reduces the ±3σ error ellipse of Apophis' trajectory ("keyhole" or b-place encounter) in 2029 to 6.0 kilometers by 2017. The spacecraft leverages off the shelf technologies where possible, incorporating leaner approaches to spacecraft design. The total life cycle cost for this mission (including operations and launch) is estimated to be $131 M. Overall system reliability is estimated to be 90.2%.The Foresight concept was submitted to the 2008 Apophis Mission Design Competition sponsored by The Planetary Society (TPS). The concept design won first place overall.
