Related papers: Long-term impact risk for (101955) 1999 RQ36
Using published simulations of the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), we forecast its ability to determine the masses of individual main-belt asteroids (MBAs) through precise astrometry of any pairs of the ~1.2 million known…
The DART spacecraft is planned to impact the secondary of the binary asteroid (65803) Didymos in 2022, to assess deflection strategies for planetary defense. The impact will create a crater and release asteroidal material, some of which…
469219 Kamo`oalewa is selected as one of the primary targets of Tianwen-2 mission, which is currently believed to be the most stable quasi-satellite of Earth. Here we derive a weak detection of the Yarkovsky effect for Kamo`oalewa, giving…
Many asteroids show indications they have undergone impacts with meteoroid particles having radii between 0.01 m and 1 m. During such impacts, small dust grains will be ejected at the impact site. The possibility of these dust grains (with…
The atmospheres of close-in extrasolar planets absorb most of the incident stellar radiation, advect this energy, then reradiate photons in preferential directions. Those photons carry away momentum, applying a force on the planet. Here we…
To date, rings are found around a Centaur (10199) Chariklo, trans-neptunian objects (TNOs) (136108) Haumea, and (50000) Quaoar. These discoveries suggest that asteroidal ring systems may be common, particularly in the outer solar system.…
Bright fireballs or bolides are caused by meteoroids entering the Earth's atmosphere at high speed. On 2013 February 15, a superbolide was observed in the skies near Chelyabinsk, Russia. Such a meteor could be the result of the decay of an…
The motion of bodies ejected from the Earth was studied, and the probabilities of collisions of such bodies with the present terrestrial planets were calculated. The dependences of these probabilities on velocities, angles and points of…
Some risks have extremely high stakes. For example, a worldwide pandemic or asteroid impact could potentially kill more than a billion people. Comfortingly, scientific calculations often put very low probabilities on the occurrence of such…
At present, approximately 1500 asteroids are known to evolve inside or sticked to the exterior 1:2 resonance with Mars at a = 2.418 AU, being (142) Polana the largest member of this group. The effect of the forced secular modes superposed…
We propose an adaptation of the semilinear algorithm for the prediction of the impact corridor on ground of an Earth-impacting asteroid. The proposed algorithm provides an efficient tool, able to reliably predict the impact regions at fixed…
When an asteroid has a few observations over a short time span the information contained in the observational arc could be so little that a full orbit determination may be not possible. One of the methods developed in recent years to…
This work extends the still modest number of multiple stars with known relative orbit orientation. Accurate astrometry and radial velocities are used jointly to compute or update outer and inner orbits in three nearby triple systems HIP…
We investigate various short-warning mitigation scenarios via fragmentation for a hypothetical impact of asteroid 2023 NT1, a Near-Earth Object (NEO) that was discovered on July 15, 2023, two days after its closest approach to Earth on July…
The computation of the Minimum Orbital Intersection Distance (MOID) is an old, but increasingly relevant problem. Fast and precise methods for MOID computation are needed to select potentially hazardous asteroids from a large catalogue. The…
Here we show an example of a young asteroid cluster located in a dynamically stable region, which was produced by partial disruption of a primitive body about 30 km in size. We estimate its age to be only 1.9 +/- 0.3 Myr, thus its…
A numerical integration of the equations of motion of the Sun-planets-an object system is used to study the evolution of orbits close to the orbit of the P/1996 R2 object, which is a Jupiter-crossing object, and to the asteroidal orbit of…
A recent paper by Siraj & Loeb (2021) entitled "Breakup of a long-period comet as the origin of the dinosaur extinction" attempts to revive the perennial debate about what type of body hit the Earth 66 million years ago, triggering the…
The population of Earth-impacting meteoroids and its size-dependent orbital elements are key to understanding the origin of meteorites and informing on planetary defence efforts. Outstanding questions include the role of collisions in…
Due to the chaotic nature of the Solar System, the question of its dynamic long-term stability can only be answered in a statistical sense, e.g. based on numerical ensemble integrations of nearby orbits. Destabilization, including…