The economic and holistic incentives of asteroid exploration have sparked an increased interest within the space industry. Missions like Hera and M-ARGO have taken steps towards said exploration, each with its own concept, but both using CubeSats due to the versatility they add. Thus, an interesting question arises on whether adopting a distributed, deep space system approach will reduce the costs and increase the versatility of the mission. To answer this query, the DASH mission takes Hera’s goals as its own to propose an innovative distributed framework that can match current asteroid exploration missions at significantly lower cost. As a result, this report deals with the design of the system and subsystem elements of the DASH mission, short for Distributed Asteroid Surveying Herd. Consequently, it is fitting to first analyse the current state of the market and then proceed with the mission-dependent elements.

Ceres is a small dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. In this work, its interior density, interior temperature, crust thickness and crust density are modelled with the aim of determining possible formation mechanisms for the cryovolcanic bright spots on its surface. The results imply that Ceres has a muddy subsurface ocean from which the cryovolcanic material originates.