Surface composition of low delta-V near-Earth asteroids, a survey of future targets for space missions

Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) are attracting nowadays more and more attention from the scientific community, because of their constant threat to human civilization, their increasing feasibility for future space missions and the opportunity to investigate pristine material. The classical "accessibility" of a celestial body can be defined in terms of the velocity change (delta-V) applied to an already free-flying spacecraft needed to realize a rendez-vous mission. It is possible to show that NEAs can be more accessible than the Moon or as difficult to reach as Jupiter and beyond (Perozzi et al. 2010). Due to their low delta-V and short mission duration, these objects could be therefore suitable targets for space missions. Unfortunately only 10% of discovered NEAs have been physically characterized. So, in order to guarantee both technical feasibility and high scientific return, we perform spectroscopic observations of 13 low delta-V NEAs. The taxonomic classification of the observed NEAs has been obtained by performing a best fit between our data and the mean spectra of each spectral class proposed by Bus & DeMeo (DeMeo et al. 2009). We also compared our observational data with laboratory spectra, searching for a possible meteorite analogue. Finally we investigate mineralogy by sampling the prominent bands in the NIR, typical of pyroxene and olivine assemblages.