Meet REMORA: The autonomous space fleet built to tag and track asteroids

To truly understand what an asteroid is made of, we need to send a probe to it.

Remote sensing from ground-based telescopes, or even orbiting observatories, can only do so much.

A new white paper submitted to the U.K.

Space Agency's 2035 Space Frontiers program (available on the arXiv preprint server) pitches just such a mission architecture.

Called the REndezvous Mission for Orbital Reconstruction of Asteroids (REMORA), the plan calls for a swarm of autonomous CubeSats to tag, track and characterize multiple near-Earth asteroids. ...