Related papers: Origin of Martian Moons from Binary Asteroid Disso…

[abridged] In the typical giant-impact scenario for the Moon formation most of the Moon's material originates from the impactor. Any Earth-impactor composition difference should, therefore, correspond to a comparable Earth-Moon composition…

Asteroid pairs sharing similar heliocentric orbits were found recently. Backward integrations of their orbits indicated that they separated gently with low relative velocities, but did not provide additional insight into their formation…

(Abridged) Planets are surrounded by fractal surfaces (traditionally called Hill spheres), separating the inner zones of long-term stable orbital motion of their satellites from the outer space where the gravitational pull from the Sun…

The origin of the irregular satellites of the giant planets has been long debated since their discovery. Their dynamical features argue against an in-situ formation suggesting they are captured bodies, yet there is no global consensus on…

The paper is devoted to investigate the capture of asteroids by Venus, Earth and Mars into the 1:1 mean motion resonance especially into Trojan orbits. Current theoretical studies predict that Trojan asteroids are a frequent by-product of…

With approximately one ninth of Earth's mass, Mars is widely considered to be a stranded planetary embryo that never became a fully-grown planet. A currently popular planet formation theory predicts that Mars formed near Earth and Venus and…

The orbital dynamics of a spacecraft orbiting around irregular small celestial bodies is a challenging problem. Difficulties to model the gravity field of these bodies arise from the poor knowledge of the exact shape as observed from the…

The origin of Saturn's rings has been debated for decades. Measurements from Voyager and Cassini have suggested that the rings could be as young as ~100 Myr and composed of nearly pure water ice. Several scenarios have been proposed to…

Following the discovery that asteroid (3753) Cruithne was a coorbital companion of the Earth, a new theory of coorbital motion has been developed whereby planets or satellites can maintain companion objects in the same orbit as themselves.…

Auroras are emissions in a planetary atmosphere caused by its interactions with the surrounding plasma environment. They have been observed in most planets and some moons of the solar system. Since their first discovery in 2005, Mars…

Potential microbial contamination of Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos, which can be brought about by transportation of Mars ejecta produced by meteoroid impacts on the Martian surface, has been comprehensively assessed in a statistical…

High precision ephemerides not only support space missions, but can also be used to study the origin and future of celestial bodies. In this paper, a coupled orbit rotation dynamics model that fully takes into account the rotation of the…

We have investigated the dependence of the prograde/retrograde temporary capture of asteroids by a planet on their original heliocentric semimajor axes through analytical arguments and numerical orbital integrations in order to discuss the…

Understanding the Moon's formation mechanism is necessary for studying not only the Moon itself, but also the evolution, formation, habitability, and structure of other planets and the moons in the Solar system and in extrasolar planetary…

New insights into the history of the inner solar system are derived from the impact cratering record of the Moon, Mars, Venus and Mercury, and from the size distributions of asteroid populations. Old craters from a unique period of heavy…

Didymos is a binary near-Earth asteroid. It is the target of the DART and HERA space missions. The primary body, Didymos, rotates close to the spin at which it is expected to shed mass. The secondary body, Dimorphos, is a 140 meters moon…

Rotationally fissioned asteroids produce unbound daughter asteroids that have very similar heliocentric orbits. Backward integration of their current heliocentric orbits provides an age of closest proximity that can be used to date the…

Most of the properties of the Earth-Moon system can be explained by a collision between a planetary embryo and the growing Earth late in the accretion process. Simulations show that most of the material that eventually aggregates to form…

We investigate a new theory of the origin of the irregular satellites of the giant planets: capture of one member of a ~100-km binary asteroid after tidal disruption. The energy loss from disruption is sufficient for capture, but it cannot…

Phobos, a moon of Mars, is below the Clarke synchronous orbit and due to tidal interaction is losing altitude. With this altitude loss it is doomed to the fate of total destruction by direct collision with Mars. On the other hand Deimos,…