Variation of delivered impulse as a function of asteroid shape

This paper will review recent research results focused on the effect of realistic asteroid shapes on the linear momentum delivered to an asteroid during a mitigation attempt. We use simple models for the effect of kinetic impactors and convolve these with a realistic asteroid shape model. For the asteroid shape we use a radar-derived shape model for the asteroid Golevka that captures global topography. For a given impact site we use realistic error distributions and determine how variable the delivered linear and angular momentum impulse is. We find strongly non-Gaussian deviations in delivered momentum, indicating that it may be difficult to achieve a desired level of precision in a deflection attempt.