Sutter Ultra is a NASA NIAC phase 2 study to find smaller and slower asteroids up to 350 times faster than all existing surveys combined. They will use sensor configuration with many low cost, high performance Compound Telescopes with Matched Filter (CTMF) technology, arrayed into a fully integrated system.
They are making a ground demo system now and hope to have a small space based four telescope demo in 2023 and a full system launched in 2028.
They should find 50-100 water rich asteroids every year.
The mission concept is a constellation of three Sutter Ultra spacecraft in a novel, stable, heliocentric Pseudo Geocentric Distant Retrograde (PRO) orbit to better find asteroids close to Earth. The entire constellation can be built for less than $400M and launched on a single Falcon 9 class rocket. Each 1,000 kg class spacecraft carries over one hundred 30 cm class telescopes, each with its own onboard image processing capability, so the entire constellation carries more than 300 telescopes working in a coordinated search pattern with multi- view characterization of NEOs and ISRUs.
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