Related papers: An Early Warning System for Asteroid Impact
In the coming decades, research in extrasolar planets aims to advance two goals: 1) detecting and characterizing low-mass planets increasingly similar to the Earth, and 2) improving our understanding of planet formation. We present a new…
We present here the design, architecture, and first data release for the Solar System Notification Alert Processing System (SNAPS). SNAPS is a Solar System broker that ingests alert data from all-sky surveys. At present, we ingest data from…
Accurate measurements of osculating orbital elements are essential in order to understand and model the complex dynamic behavior of Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs). ESA's Gaia mission promises to have great potential in this respect. In this…
High energy solar flares and coronal mass ejections have the potential to destroy Earth's ground and satellite infrastructures, causing trillions of dollars in damage and mass human suffering. Destruction of these critical systems would…
A comprehensive characterization of the detection efficiency of nine of the major asteroid surveys that have been active over the past two decades is presented. The detection efficiency is estimated on a nightly basis by comparing the…
On 2020 September 18 US Government sensors detected a bolide with peak bolometric magnitude of -19 over the western Pacific. The impact was also detected by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instrument on the GOES-17 satellite and…
Most asteroids are somewhat elongated and have non-zero lightcurve amplitudes. Such asteroids can be detected in large-scale sky surveys even if their mean magnitudes are fainter than the stated sensitivity limits. We explore the detection…
Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) in the 1-100 meter size range are estimated to be $\sim$1,000 times more numerous than the $\sim$15,000 currently-catalogued NEAs, most of which are in the 0.5-10 kilometer size range. Impacts from 10-100 meter…
Although many near-Earth objects have been found by ground-based telescopes, some fast-moving ones, especially those near detection limits, have been missed by observatories. We developed a convolutional neural network for detecting faint…
Terra Seismic can predict most major earthquakes (M6.2 or greater) at least 2 - 5 months before they will strike. Global earthquake prediction is based on determinations of the stressed areas that will start to behave abnormally before…
Apophis' current trajectory takes it safely past our planet at a distance of several Earth radii on 2029 April 13. Here the possibility is considered that Apophis could collide with a small asteroid, like the ones that frequently and…
The Solar System Notification Alert Processing System (SNAPS) is a ZTF and Rubin Observatory alert broker that will send alerts to the community regarding interesting events in the Solar System. SNAPS is actively monitoring Solar System…
We present an updated set of near-Earth asteroids with a Yarkovsky-related semimajor axis drift detected from the orbital fit to the astrometry. We find 87 reliable detections after filtering for the signal-to-noise ratio of the Yarkovsky…
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) such as unmanned aerial vehicles are vulnerable to slow degradation that develops without causing immediate or obvious failures. Small sensor biases or timing irregularities can accumulate over time, gradually…
The observed near-Earth asteroid population contains very few objects with small perihelion distances, say, q<=0.2 au. NEAs that currently have orbits with larger q might be hiding a past evolution during which they have approached closer…
Numerical modeling has long suggested that gravitationally-bound (or so-called rubble-pile) near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) can be destroyed by tidal forces during close and slow encounters with terrestrial planets. However, tidal disruptions…
The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS shows a weak cometary activity. Its brightness suggests a maximum radius of ~10km (A/0.05)^{-1/2} for an asteroid with an albedo A. I show that interstellar objects with that radius would amount to an…
We used WISE-derived geometric albedos (p_V) and diameters, as well as geometric albedos and diameters from the literature, to produce more accurate diurnal Yarkovsky drift predictions for 540 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) out of the current…
Asteroids and other Small Solar System Bodies (SSSBs) are of high general and scientific interest in many aspects. The origin, formation, and evolution of our Solar System (and other planetary systems) can be better understood by analysing…
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…