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WHEN ANTS MEETS PAM: FUTURE EXPLORATION OF THE ASTEROID
BELT
American Geolphysical Union 2004 Joint Assembly http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/SFgate/SFgate?language=English&verbose=0&listenv=table&application=sm04&convert=&converthl=&refinequery=&formintern=&formextern=&transquery=asteroid&_lines=&multiple=0&descriptor=%2fdata%2fepubs%2fwais%2findexes%2fsm04%2fsm04%7c460%7c3633%7cANTS%2fPAM:%20Future%20Exploration%20of%20the%20Asteroid%20Belt%7cHTML%7clocalhost:0%7c%2fdata%2fepubs%2fwais%2findexes%2fsm04%2fsm04%7c5694043%205697676%20%2fdata2%2fepubs%2fwais%2fdata%2fsm04%2fsm04.txt ANTS/PAM: Future Exploration of the Asteroid Belt AU: * Clark, P E EM: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AF: L3 Communications, GSI, 3750 Centerview Drive, Chantilly, VA 20151 United States AU: Curtis, S A EM: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AF: NASA/Goddard, Code 695 Greenbelt Road, Greenbelt, MD 20771 United States AU: Rilee, M L EM: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AF: L3 Communications, GSI, 3750 Centerview Drive, Chantilly, VA 20151 United States AU: Cheung, C Y EM: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AF: NASA/Goddard, Code 695 Greenbelt Road, Greenbelt, MD 20771 United States AB: The Autonomous Nano-Technology Swarm (ANTS) is applied to the Prospecting Asteroid Mission (PAM) concept, as part of a NASA RASC study. The ANTS architecture is inspired by success of social insect colonies, based on the division of labor within the colonies: 1) within their specialties, individual specialists generally outperform general-ists, and 2) with sufficiently efficient social interaction and coordination, the group of specialists generally outper-forms the group of generalists. ANTS as applied to PAM involves a thousand individual specialist `sciencecraft', one subswarm per target, in an environment where detection and tracking of irregular, infrequent targets is a major chal-lenge. Workers, carry and operate eight to nine different scientific instruments, including spectrometers, ranging and radio science devices, imagers. The remaining specialists, Messenger/Rulers, provide communication and coordina-tion. The non-expendable propulsion system is based on autonomously deployable and configurable solar sails, a system suitable to a low gravity environment. The design of the neural basis function requires a minimum of 4 or 5 specialists for collective decision making. Allowing for ten instrument specialist teams and compensating for antici-pated high attrition, we calculate an initial minimum of 100 per subswarm should allow characterization of hundreds of asteroids. The difficulty in observing irregular, rapidly moving, poorly illuminated objects is largely overcome by the ANT sciencecraft capability to optimize conditions for each instrument. Components are composed of carbon nanotubules reversibly deployable from NEMS nodes, allowing 100 times decrease in packaging volume. 1000 smart 10 centimeter, 1 kg cubic boxes create a 1000 kg 1 meter cube. |
