The Deployment of MASCOT-2 to Didymoon

This paper presents a strategy for the deployment of the Mascot-2 lander of the Asteroid Impact Monitoring (AIM) candidate mission, to the secondary of the binary asteroid system Didymoon. The spacecraft would release the lander with a spring, near the L2 region. The lander would free fall to the surface and come to rest after several bounces. Considering inaccuracies of the spacecraft navigation and of the spring mechanism, the different tradeoffs of mission design are analyzed. Pushing the strategy to its working limits, the paper investigates whether it could be applied to the deployment of objects from smaller and less capable spacecraft.