Missions to asteroids have been on a tear recently. Visits by Rosetta, Osirix-REX, and Hayabusa2 have all visited small bodies and, in some cases, successfully returned samples to the Earth. But as humanity starts reaching out to asteroids, it will run into a significant technical problem—bandwidth.

There are tens of thousands of asteroids in our vicinity, some of which could potentially be dangerous. If we launched a mission to collect necessary data about each of them, our interplanetary communication and control infrastructure would be quickly overwhelmed. So why not let our robotic ambassadors do it for themselves—that's the idea behind a new paper published in the Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics and available on the arXiv preprint server from researchers at the Federal University of São Paulo and Brazil's National Institute for Space Research.

The paper primarily focuses on the control problem of what to do when a spacecraft is approaching a new asteroid.