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Directed Energy Missions For Planetary Defense, Philip Lubin, Gary Hughes, Mike Eskenazi, Kelly Kosmo, Isabella Johansson, Janelle Griswold, Mark Pryor, Hugh O'Neill, Peter Meinhold, Johnathan Suen, Jordan Riley, Qicheng Zhang, Kevin Walsh, Carl Melis, Miikka Kangas, Caio Motta, Travis Brashears

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Directed energy for planetary defense is now a viable option and is superior in many ways to other proposed technologies, being able to defend the Earth against all known threats. This paper presents basic ideas behind a directed energy planetary defense system that utilizes laser ablation of an asteroid to impart a deflecting force on the target. A conceptual philosophy called DE-STAR, which stands for Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and exploration, is an orbiting stand-off system, which has been described in other papers. This paper describes a smaller, stand-on system known as DE-STARLITE as a reduced-scale version …