Related papers: Asteroid Deflection: How, where and when?
Deflection missions to near-Earth asteroids will encounter non-negligible uncertainties in the physical and orbital parameters of the target object. In order to reliably assess future impact threat mitigation operations such uncertainties…
Asteroidal impact threats to the Earth will be predicted a century or more in advance. Changing an asteroid's albedo changes the force of Solar radiation on it, and hence its orbit. Albedo may be changed by applying a thin ($\sim 0.1\,\mu$)…
Asteroid restructuring uses robotics, self replication, and mechanical automatons to autonomously restructure an asteroid into a large rotating space station. The restructuring process makes structures from asteroid oxide materials; uses…
In Epoch 2 of the 2024 PDC25 Hypothetical Asteroid Impact Scenario, an asteroid is confirmed to be on a collision course with the Earth, and its size and surface composition have been well characterized via a flyby mission. A kinetic…
Most major planetary bodies in the solar system rotate in the same direction as their orbital motion: their spin is prograde. Theoretical studies to explain the direction as well as the magnitude of the spin vector have had mixed success.…
The under-abundance of asteroids on orbits with small perihelion distances suggests that thermally-driven disruption may be an important process in the removal of rocky bodies in the Solar System. Here we report our study of how the debris…
Asteroid pairs had a single progenitor that split due to rotational-fission of a weak, rubble-pile structured body. By constructing shape models of asteroid pairs from multiple-apparition observations and using a lightcurve inversion…
Spectral characterization of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) has revealed a continuum of space-weathered states for the surfaces of S-complex NEAs, with Q-class NEAs, an S-complex subclass, most closely matching the un-weathered surfaces of…
A body dissipates energy when it freely rotates about any axis different from principal. This entails relaxation, i.e., decrease of the rotational energy, with the angular momentum preserved. The spin about the major-inertia axis…
Young and forming planetesimals experience impacts from particles present in a protostellar disk. Using crater scaling laws, we integrate ejecta distributions for oblique impacts. For impacts at 10 to 65 m/s, expected for impacts associated…
Laser ablation of a Near-Earth Object (NEO) on a collision course with Earth produces a cloud of ejecta which exerts a thrust on the NEO, deflecting it from its original trajectory. Ablation may be performed from afar by illuminating an…
Some asteroids eject dust, unexpectedly producing transient, comet-like comae and tails. First ascribed to the sublimation of near-surface water ice, mass losing asteroids (also called "main-belt comets") can in fact be driven by a…
Asteroids can be eclipsed by other bodies in the Solar System, but no direct observation of an asteroid eclipse has been reported to date. We describe a statistical method to predict an eclipse for an asteroid based on the analysis of the…
Containing only a few percent the mass of the moon, the current asteroid belt is around three to four orders of magnitude smaller that its primordial mass inferred from disk models. Yet dynamical studies have shown that the asteroid belt…
The distribution of heavy elements is anomalously low in the asteroid main belt region compared with elsewhere in the solar system. Observational surveys also indicate a deficit in the number of small ($ \le 50$~km size) asteroids that is…
Seismic shaking is an attractive mechanism to explain the destabilisation of regolith slopes and the regolith migration found on the surfaces of asteroids (Richardson et al. 2004; Miyamoto et al. 2007). Here, we use a continuum mechanics…
We present a practical and effective method of planetary defense that allows for extremely short mitigation time scales if required as well as long time scale mitigation. This one system allows for virtually any required defense mode. In…
This paper outlines the Radio Science Experiment (RSE) proposed for the RAMSES mission to asteroid (99942) Apophis, which will undergo a close Earth encounter in April 2029. This event provides a unique opportunity to study the asteroid's…
DESTINY+ is an upcoming JAXA Epsilon medium-class mission to fly by the Geminids meteor shower parent body (3200) Phaethon. It will be the world's first spacecraft to escape from a near-geostationary transfer orbit into deep space using a…
While no known asteroid poses a threat to Earth for at least the next century, the catalog of near-Earth asteroids is incomplete for objects whose impacts would produce regional devastation. Several approaches have been proposed to…