What does it take to capture an asteroid? A case study on capturing asteroid 2006 RH120

The population of "temporarily captured asteroids" offers attractive candidates for asteroid retrieval missions. Once captured, these asteroids have lifetimes ranging from a few months up to several years in the vicinity of the Earth.1 One could potentially extend the duration of such temporary capture phases by acting upon the asteroid with slow deflection techniques that conveniently modify their trajectories, in order to allow for an affordable access to an asteroid for in-situ study. In this paper we present a case study on asteroid 2006 RH120, which got temporarily captured in 2006-2007 and is the single known member of this category up to date. We study what it would have taken to prolong its capture and estimate that deflecting the asteroid with 0:27 N for less than 6 months and a total ΔV barely 32 m/s, would have sufficed to extend the capture for over 5 additional years.