Ramses asteroid mission on track ahead of key funding

WASHINGTON — A European-led mission to the asteroid Apophis is on schedule ahead of key funding decisions in the coming months in both Europe and Japan.

The European Space Agency funded preparatory work last year for the Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety, or Ramses, which will go to the asteroid shortly before it makes a very close but safe flyby of Earth in April 2029.

ESA provided about 70 million euros ($82 million) to the project to keep development on schedule even before formally approving and funding the mission. That decision will come at ESA’s ministerial conference in late November in Bremen, Germany.

That early investment has paid off, project officials said at a Sept. 8 briefing during the EPSC-DPS planetary science conference in Helsinki, Finland.

“Up to now, we are fully in line with the planning,” said Paolo Martino, Ramses project manager at ESA. “We are hitting every milestone, so we are fully ready to hopefully support a positive decision two months from now.”

That work includes completing a preliminary design review late last year. A critical design review is scheduled to begin in November. Passing that, he said, would allow the mission to move into spacecraft assembly in 2026, with functional and environmental testing to follow in 2027.

That would set the mission up to launch during a window less than three weeks long in late April through early May 2028. Ramses would arrive at Apophis in February 2029, within two months of the asteroid’s flyby of Earth.

Ramses is leveraging the spacecraft design and experience from Hera, another asteroid mission that launched last year to Didymos, following up on NASA’s DART planetary defense mission. That mission was developed rapidly, with launch coming less than five years after formal approval.

“The Hera mission already set a record in terms of speed, because it was developed in only four years from contract signature to launch,” Martino said. “In this case, we are raising the bar even further.”

The project has not disclosed its estimated total cost or how much funding it needs to secure at the ministerial, where ESA’s 23 member states will set funding levels for programs for the next three years. He said figures could not be disclosed now, citing ongoing work preparing for the ministerial.

However, he suggested the mission should cost somewhat less than Hera, which had a total cost, including launch, of 363 million euros. “Ramses is a faster and cheaper version of Hera,” he said.

Another factor that could reduce the cost of the mission to ESA is collaboration with the Japanese space agency JAXA. The two agencies announced Aug. 27 that JAXA had officially requested funding from the Japanese government to participate on Ramses. That would include providing an infrared imager and solar arrays for the spacecraft as well as its launch on an H3 rocket. ESA and JAXA signed an agreement last November to study potential collaboration on Ramses.

That would build on existing cooperation between the agencies on Hera. “The idea here for Ramses is to strengthen the relationship between the two communities and agencies,” said Seiji Sugita, a professor at the University of Tokyo who is on the science management board for the mission.

Sugita, who noted he was not speaking on behalf of JAXA, played down concerns raised at the briefing that any decision to support Ramses could be affected by the resignation of Japan’s prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, Sept. 7. He said past changes in prime ministers have not affected the budget process, and noted that the request for Ramses would be a very small fraction of the overall JAXA budget.

“I think if things are similar to the last 10 to 20 years in the Japanese political climate, the switchover of the prime minister should not make too much of a change in this level of the budget,” he said.

While the H3 is baselined to launch Ramses, Martino said the project was keeping Europe’s Ariane 6 as a backup. He expected Japan to approve funding for its contributions to Ramses, including the launch, by the first half of next year.

“The timeline for the procurement of an Ariane is more flexible, so it can take place in the second part” of next year, if needed, he said.

Project officials added that a forcing function for decisions will be the strict schedule needed to enable Ramses to reach Apophis in time for the flyby, an extremely rare event.

“Nature chooses for us when it visits us,” said Patrick Michel, a planetary scientist involved with the mission, at the briefing. “Apophis won’t wait, so we cannot wait for the political mess to be solved.”