In 2029, a 350-meter asteroid will pass closer to Earth than the satellites that beam your weather forecast, and British scientists want to be ready with six tiny robots to meet it. The mission is called REMORA—Rendezvous Mission for Orbital Reconstruction of Asteroids—a proposed fleet of autonomous CubeSats that would tag, track, and study multiple near-Earth asteroids without waiting for commands from the ground. It's an audacious plan, but it addresses a genuinely urgent gap in humanity's understanding of the rocks that occasionally threaten us.
The UK has produced some of the world's finest asteroid researchers. They've contributed to landmark missions like the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid to test our planetary defense capabilities, and they helped analyze samples from the asteroid Bennu. Yet the country has never funded its own dedicated asteroid exploration mission—a gap that researchers at the University of Liverpool, led by Stefania Soldini, are determined to close. REMORA could be the answer, pitched at just €50 million, a remarkable budget for a spacefaring mission.
The technical trick lies in autonomy. A traditional swarm of six spacecraft would normally require an entire control room full of operators managing every maneuver from Earth. That would obliterate the budget. Instead, the REMORA team is developing an artificial intelligence suite called Near-Earth Asteroid Regions (NEAR), which calculates fuel-efficient flight paths on the fly, allowing each CubeSat to navigate independently around its assigned asteroid. The software breaks into specialized components: dynNEAR handles dynamic modeling of the asteroid's gravity, while goNEAR charts collision-free courses through the debris field.
The mission draws its name from the remora fish, which attaches itself to sharks in a mutually beneficial relationship. Each CubeSat would do the same—either clinging to or closely orbiting an individual asteroid to study its composition, structure, and hazard potential in far greater detail than any telescope on Earth or in orbit could achieve. This direct inspection matters enormously. Ground-based telescopes and space observatories can tell us an asteroid's rough size and trajectory, but they cannot reveal what it's made of, how strong it is, or how it would respond to an impact.
The timing is particularly urgent. In 2029, asteroid Apophis will become visible to the naked eye across parts of the UK—an extraordinarily rare event—as it passes closer than geosynchronous satellites. That same year is the United Nations' International Year of Asteroid Awareness and Planetary Defense. There's a critical blind spot in humanity's asteroid-detection capabilities: we struggle to spot rocks coming from the direction of the sun, a vulnerability exposed by the Chelyabinsk impact in Russia in 2013, when an undetected meteor exploded over the city with enormous force. REMORA is designed to help close precisely that gap.
The UK also possesses hidden infrastructure advantages. The University of Liverpool houses the Zero-G Astrolab, which boasts the flattest floor in Britain—an air-bearing laboratory where physical prototypes can be tested in near-weightless conditions. Additionally, Surrey has become a global hub for small-satellite engineering, home to Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., where such missions could eventually be manufactured. The white paper, submitted to the UK Space Agency's 2035 Space Frontiers program, proposes a Phase 0 pilot study to integrate these scientific payloads into SSTL's commercial launches.
Funding remains uncertain in the UK's current fiscal environment, but REMORA's architecture could appeal to space agencies and private organizations worldwide. It represents a practical, affordable way to transform our planetary defense from reactive to informed.